Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) vs. SMTP Email Relay Solutions

Amazon Simple Email Service comes with the bundle of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and it also offers a limited number of emails per month for free. One who has a technical background and wants to send custom emails with custom domains in a professional way can go with Amazon Simple Email Service. If you have no technical background or tech team, it might not be useful for you.

Incentivized

It works great as an onsite relay to provide email sending functionality without having to pass through the firewall in order to reach the Office 365 gateway. This is particularly evident when using older programs. A lot of the older, no longer developed, programs will only allow a hard coded port to send email. Office 365 uses a non-standard SMTP port for security. This does not allow the hard coded SMTP ports to use this service. Exchange gives you the control to change those ports and securely use the standards without compromise.

Incentivized

• Amazon Simple Email Service is a much lower cost than most other solutions and truly makes cost a non-factor in most situations where we consider implementing it.
• The API is so well documented that implementing Amazon Simple Email Service in nearly any application or codebase is achievable with basic coding knowledge.

Incentivized

• It allows us to send email through the secure email gateway.
• We are able to track and scan all email communications
• It provides a way for legacy and current applications to send out notification and mass email communications.

Incentivized

• Even if you do not want to spam, you cant send an email to the unverified users.
• Integration with other services is a bit tricky. To watch the trail, handle bounced emails, save emails on S3 are not straightforward to implement.
• When you want to send a lot of emails (in bulk), it takes a significant amount of time.

Incentivized

• As with any technology on a server, we sometimes see issues with downtime related to network changes or firewall updates.
• It can be a challenge to work with some of our older applications when the TLS feature is used.
• I wish there was a more direct way to reliably use SMTP for mass email sends without the fear of being blacklisted.

Incentivized

We did not have the need of contacting Amazon for support. The documentation they provide is of great quality. Examples are easy to follow. One thing to have into consideration is we didn't have the premium support for AWS, so I can't provide details on how good or bad this service is, but in general, the basic support I had was great.

Incentivized

Mailchimp has a fixed monthly price, and with the number of emails that we sent, it's pretty expensive. Since our mailings are quite infrequent, using Mailchimp didn't make financial sense for us, even though Mailchimp is a more polished, packaged solution for email marketing. We evaluated other email delivery solutions as well and didn't find anything that matches Amazon SES on reliability and pricing.

Incentivized

Office 365 does use secure non-standard ports for SMTP connectivity causing a problem with older programs. SMTP Email Delivery from Exchange solves this problem by giving the network admin full control over ports and specific program connections. While we do use both Office 365 and the SMTP Email Delivery we find that a mix is needed in order to meet all expectations for our end users. The majority of our SMTP communications, for users, go through Office 365 while the majority of our applications and servers do go through the SMTP Email Delivery service.

Incentivized

• SES is still more cost effective than other email services like Mailgun.
• Unless we have a high-traffic month, staying within the free tier is very nice for our bottom line.
• Not having to spend time worrying about SES reliability saves us frustration and money.

Incentivized

• It's the easiest way to send mail out. No worries about complex configurations.
• It can be finicky when used in a hybrid Office 365 environment to get the proper pathways secured and working.
• I wish there were a better way to send out mass emails, on-site, without our domain or server IP being blacklisted.

Incentivized