Amazon SES
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is a managed email service from Amazon Web Services for sending and receiving email — transactional messages, marketing campaigns and bulk mail — from applications, without running a mail server.
Key points
- Sends via an SMTP interface or the SES API (the current version is SES API v2), so existing mail-capable applications can switch to it with configuration rather than code changes. The console also supports sending directly, and templates/contact lists cover simple bulk-send use cases without a full application.
- Every new SES account starts in the sandbox, region by region: while sandboxed, you can only send to verified email addresses/domains (or the SES mailbox simulator), capped at 200 messages per 24-hour period and 1 message per second. Moving to production access is a manual request (console or
sesv2 put-account-detailsvia the CLI) describing whether you send marketing or transactional mail; AWS Support typically responds within 24 hours. - Virtual Deliverability Manager (VDM) is SES’s built-in deliverability dashboard: it gives account- and configuration-set-level visibility into sending health (delivery, bounce, complaint, open/click rates) and deliverability recommendations, plus tools to track engagement and reputation over time — reducing the guesswork in diagnosing why mail is landing in spam.
- Handles the deliverability machinery: dedicated/shared/managed-shared IP addresses, DKIM and SPF signing, bounce and complaint feedback, and reputation tracking.
- Also supports inbound email receiving, delivering messages to Amazon S3 or triggering AWS Lambda for processing.
- Email only. It does not send SMS text messages, which is the boundary that matters most in practice: Amazon SNS is the service that fans a single published message out to many subscribers across email, SMS, HTTPS endpoints and queues, while SES is a mail transport aimed at individually addressed messages.
- Distinct again from Amazon SQS, which stores messages until a consumer is ready to process them rather than delivering them to people.