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Amazon SES

Amazon SES

Overview

What is Amazon SES?

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is an outbound-only email-sending service useful for marketing and transactional email, relying on the infrastructure of Amazon. Amazon SES provides the requisite statistics and built-in notifications for bounces, complaints, and deliveries for optimization of…

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Recent Reviews

Fast and simple setup

10 out of 10
December 04, 2019
Incentivized
I use Amazon SES for mailing forms from websites. I've found delivery to be very reliable and much faster than standard phpmailer. It's …
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Pricing

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Sending Emails from an Application Hosted in Amazon EC2

$0.10 ($0.12)

Cloud
for every 1,000 emails after 62,000 (for each GB of storage)

Sending Emails from Another Email Client or Software Package

$0.10 ($0.12)

Cloud
for every 1,000 emails (for each GB of storage)

Receiving Email

$0.10

Cloud
for emails after the first 1,000

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Details

What is Amazon SES?

Amazon SES Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is an outbound-only email-sending service useful for marketing and transactional email, relying on the infrastructure of Amazon. Amazon SES provides the requisite statistics and built-in notifications for bounces, complaints, and deliveries for optimization of campaigns. Emails are sent via SMTP or the Amazon SES API. Amazon's pricing is per usage, presently at $.10 per thousand sends. The service is free for users of Amazon EC2 (up to 62,000 messages), and for new users of the Amazon AWS service free usage tier (from the 15 GB of data transfer across AWS services).

Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 8.3.

The most common users of Amazon SES are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(65)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-21 of 21)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We were looking for a tool to send bulk promotional and transactional emails without putting them in spam, then we looked over Amazon Simple Email Service (SES). It offers various features which are not simple, as its name sounds. We can use their well-developed SDK to send emails via our server and our domain.
  • It has fair pricing, we do not have to loose our pockets just to send emails.
  • We can customize the emails according to our choice and set the default responses to senders.
  • It offers good reputed IPs, so generally our emails don't directly jump to the spam folder.
  • It would be great if they could help us to track the deliveries of the emails sent via SES.
  • For beginners, setting up Amazon Simple Email Service for the first time might be a little difficult task.
  • Might not that be good for a non-tech savvy person.
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.
December 01, 2021

Emails Management

Zobia Khan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We integrate it into our website to get feedback or help the customers after the launch and it was great working using simple email service (SES). It was easy to set up. it is efficient to use. It is very cheap in cost as well. It was a great experience using it
  • It very cheap in cost.
  • it provide efficient monitoring for the quotas of our email limits.
  • It is very easy to configure set up and handle.
  • It is only hard when we need sandbox environment to setup because it is only provide on valid cases.
It is difficult to set a Sandbox environment. In the SNS environment, we need to verify all emails we need to send emails and all emails we want to receive an email so it becomes difficult when we integrate it to a website where tons of emails are going to receive in it.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Amazon SES to send non-transactional (marketing) emails for our online services. It makes sense for us to keep transactional and non-transactional email routing totally separate, and Amazon SES allows that.
  • Deliverability reports
  • DKIM and Dmarc integration
  • Ease of integration with non-Amazon infrastructure
  • SES handles sending email really well, but receiving email part is very bare-bones. It can forward to HTTP endpoints, but cannot provide industry standard APIs like IMAP.
Amazon SES is well-suited for a "do-it-yourself" mass-mailing solution, where fine control over mail delivery is required. Since mail server reputation affects deliverability greatly, and SES has a good reputation, it's a great fit for SMBs: mail server reputation cannot be built overnight. Amazon SES is not a turnkey solution, so significant internal expertise is required, and it cannot be compared to packaged services like Mailchimp.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Amazon Simple Email Service to send out email notifications on different scenarios and different triggers like when EC2 shuts down due to crash. We also detect events like memory overflow on EC2, S3 bucket changes, and various fishing attacks on an EC2 instance.
  • Sends out email notifications
  • Pay as you use
  • Cannot send emails to unregistered users
  • Reporting section is weak
We use Amazon Simple Email Service to auto-respond to users that submit messages through a contact form. We are using Amazon Simple Email Service with our self hosted python application to send our marketing emails, get feedback for our services, and Hackathons.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) on several client accounts as well as several of our own applications and services. We primarily use Amazon Simple Email Service to send informational emails related to status notifications, important updates, and information requests within different applications and services. We've implemented SES for as many as 50 domains and feel confident when recommending it to clients.
  • 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.
  • While the service limits are one of the main points that keep the delivery metrics so reliable, it can be stressful to get a new implementation out the door quickly.
  • If you're looking for a point-and-click style email delivery tool, this is not the right type of product for you. Amazon Simple Email Service is for a developer-centric approach to implementation into existing applications, processes, and services.
Amazon Simple Email Service is an excellent choice for integrating high-volume or important email delivery into an existing application, service, or custom established workflow in your organization. If you have a true development group looking for a seamless way of handling email delivery, this is the right product for you. It's easiest to set up if you're already using other AWS services such as Route53 for DNS but can function as a standalone service. However, if you're expecting a product that was designed to do all of its intended functions from a user interface, that's not what Amazon Simple Email Service was intended to be.
Francisco Mosse | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it to send newsletters from our company. And we have installed it to a lot of clients, integrated with PHP email scripts (that we made ourselves) so they can send emails too. We have users with more than 1 million mails sent per day. It's very useful because delivery is fast and it's easy to integrate with PHP scripts.
  • High percentage of deliverability.
  • Cost savings.
  • They could have a list of bounced emails so it's easy for the sender to delete those emails from databases.
It's not for spam. They have a limit for bounced emails, so you must have your email lists clean and updated.
December 05, 2019

Easy to use!

Diego Turcios Lara | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We decide to use Amazon Simple Email Service for our email service, as we were having all of our infrastructure running in AWS, and we really think this was the best move. Working on a specific web application and we need it to send emails, so for developers was really easy to interact with AWS SDK for implementing the changes. For operation, this was a great option also, as the price is really low, and this is a great plus compare to other services in the market.
  • If you're running your applications in a EC2, the first 62,000 emails are free.
  • Pay as you go is a great feature.
  • No cons! Great service and and easy to use.
If you're working with an AWS infrastructure this is the best move, as you will get great benefits from using it and your development team will feel that they know what they're doing. If you're not using AWS, this probably can be a problem, as you will not get the 62,000 emails for free, or developers will feel a little strange working with different technologies.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use SES both internally and for customers. Internally it is used for our website contact forms and other internal applications.
We have used SES with several customers for the past 8 or so years.

SES solves one of the most common annoyances in programming. Email deliverability. With SES (configured correctly) we have no issues with spam filters.
  • SES is highly reliable. Haven't had any issues that I know of.
  • It is extremely cost effective. Most of the time we stay under the free tier which is nice!
  • Once set up, it's pretty much hands free. Haven't had to adjust old code... ever.
  • As with most AWS services, you're on your own unless you pay for support. So there is a learning curve, but nothing major.
  • Although things may have changed, I haven't seen any email templates. Again, that may have changed.
SES is great when you have an online form that needs to send email. It's bullet proof and can handle large loads.
I probably wouldn't use SES for a smaller temporary use case. There is configuration needed with SES and potential (tiny) costs.

Generally, I have one configuration that I use for most forms unless I expect high traffic. In that case I keep it separate.
December 04, 2019

Fast and simple setup

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Amazon SES for mailing forms from websites. I've found delivery to be very reliable and much faster than standard phpmailer. It's quite easy to set-up and verify your domain, and emails still deliver as if they came from your website.
  • Speedy delivery - usually in seconds
  • Easy setup - just a few minutes per domain
  • Inexpensive to use - few dollars a month for reliable service
  • The set-up interface could be made simpler. Some things aren't intuitive.
  • It's not easy to find from the AWS menus.
  • A simple testing script would be nice, but I've never had trouble using it.
Perfect for website forms. Never used it elsewhere, but for form delivery it can't beat it. Even WordPress has plugins that make hook-up very simple and straightforward.
Jay Momaya | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are starting to use the AWS ecosystem for different developments. So for our department in our organization our demos are hosted on AWS and we are sending all the outbound emails using AWS SES. The benefit of this is we don't have to set up an SMTP server and we can directly use this feature with no extra efforts.
  • No SMTP server setup if already in AWS ecosystem
  • Quick and Easy setup & integration
  • Pay as you use - no extra cost
  • Always verifies the email before you can it. Hectic process.
  • Email template facility is not available.
In our demos, we try sending the reports to the email ids from which the user is logged in. Our demos are hosted on AWS ECS and the whole demo works on the AWS ecosystem. So to send the reports we use AWS SES as it is in the same ecosystem, no extra SMTP configuration needed and it is very easy. So in this way, we use SES for many demos and other use as well.
Apurv Doshi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use SES across the organization. The main use-cases are as described below:
  • To provide auto-response of "Contact Us" like inquiry
  • We use SES in our CI and CD pipelines to supply the necessary information to respective stakeholders about build, deployment and unit testing
  • Some of the web solutions which we have hosted and requires to send outbound emails, we use SES
  • It provides a Console approach to send emails. This approach is really effective to monitor your mailing activities.
  • Amazon provides great integration with other services as well. One can trigger a lambda function when Email is received. One can set SNS for the notification of bounced emails.
  • The HTML content as an email body makes it possible to format your email. To put the tables and bit complex layout are also easy with SES in place.
  • 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.
When you have set up your ecosystem with AWS, SES is the best option to send a message. If you have EC2 for any of the applications, you can do 62K free emails per month. The way it interacts with SNS, S3, AWS KMS (to encrypt the email before storing to the S3) and Amazon cloud watch makes it more comprehensive.
If you are not an Amazon shop and just looking for SMTP solutions, SES is not for you.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon SES is currently being used by our team (Mobile/ IoT) to send customized emails to users in reaction to events.
  • It provides a simple syntax to create templates for customized emails
  • It has a great rate limit once moved out of the sandbox
  • Nice mechanisms to handle bounce and replies
  • The AWS console needs to provide a GUI to create a template for an email rather than developers having to use the CLI or SDKs
  • The initial sandbox limits are too low for any production application
It is best suited for sending customized emails to users in reaction to events from other AWS services.
It is less appropriate for just sending out notification emails in which case SNS should be used.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I've used several email service products over the years, mainly SendGrid, MailChimp, and SES. In my role as a consultant, I aim to recommend the best tool for the business problem being solved. While most companies can get away with stock or lightly modified SaaS solutions, if email is absolutely core to your business, I'd recommend Amazon's Simple Email Service. It provides the lowest pricing outside of building up your own sender reputation while providing the same flexibility and performance, especially if your application servers are already in AWS.
  • Great pricing
  • Amazing performance when accessed from inside AWS
  • Granular API provides great amounts of flexibility
  • Improve performance when accessed from outside AWS
  • Improve web interface capabilities
While most companies can get away with stock or lightly modified SaaS solutions, if email is absolutely core to your business, I'd recommend Amazon's Simple Email Service. It provides the lowest pricing outside of building up your own sender reputation, while providing the same flexibility and performance, especially if your application servers are already in AWS.

The drawback to all this power is that you need to dedicate engineering resources to building, modifying, and maintaining your email pipeline. If you can't justify those expenses, go with a SaaS product.

Luis Escoffié | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Amazon SES to send transactional emails with high deliverability. We want our customers to have the best rate and results. Setting Amazon SES as a provider is really easy and it helps us reach as many inboxes as possible.
  • Higher deliverability
  • Higher reputation
  • Easy setup
  • SES knowledge to setup
  • Email marketing background to keep the lists with very low bounces and complaints
When companies need to send bulk transactional emails to their customers, like in Mexico for accountant purposes.
Dave Stack | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Amazon SES to send out watch list emails so users can know when new listings appear on our website.
  • cheap
  • fast
  • reliable
  • suppression list removal is a pain and you can't see which emails are suppressed like with other services
  • API isn't the easiest to use when integrating with PERL
  • SES gets blocked by a lot of ISPs due to many bad actors using it. Having a dedicated IP is the only way to go
SES is well suited if you need to send a ton of emails cheaply and 100% deliverablity isn't needed.
Anindya Chatterjee | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are a CRM vendor and our product is deployed as a service (SAAS). We use SES to send out automated emails to clients - when they register, when they forget their password and need it re-set and [we use it for]the first set of onboarding emails. We do not use it for email marketing.
  • Low cost; I do not know anyone that can match their low cost unless you are in the free tier of G-Suite for work Gmail.
  • High reliability - messages do get delivered. We have had no issues.
  • Easy to set up the basics - generate the credentials and add it to your code.
  • Setting up for bounces is just so hard! Amazon needs to do a better job here in providing instructions.
  • Struggling to set up spf- again, the instructions are not great and often confusing.
If you are looking for a no fuss, functional email delivery engine at a very low cost, Amazon SES is great. But, there is a learning curve, the documentation is often dense and many times, you yearn for a simple GUI, while setting up your interface. SES has barebones analytics - virtually none. It also does not do list management. Mapping bounces to SNS is not very intuitive either. If you are sending embedded images, you need to load them from external servers.
December 04, 2017

About SES at a glance.

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Amazon Simple Email Service for sending out emails related to password changes, emailing the details about the latest updates to the product, sending out links to verify user activity etc. SES enabled us to sink our systems to help users understand their recent driving behavior using a single button click. SES enabled us to send HTML pages which were built very easily.
  • Easy to send thousands of messages without worrying about scaling.
  • Very easy to understand SDK and modules in Java and Python and start sending custom emails in minutes.
  • Not a costly service. Implementing using the service and training people is really simple.
  • Could maintain a dashboard with the list of previously sent emails and their templates.
  • Amazon Simple Email Service dashboard could be made more user-friendly by including few HTML snippets so that they are readily available for testing.
Amazon Simple Email Service could be used to target user engagement just like SNS notifications. This could be an alternative where the user might need to have some registration information, password reset emails, marketing emails etc. It is less appropriate if you want to map a domain name on top of amazon.com domain name as its clearly visible on which service is being used to send out emails.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Amazon's Simple Email Service to handle sending out important notifications and replies from our ticketing system. When we initially launched we quickly surpassed the volume of email that Google allowed through their SMTP relay, so I quickly set up SES to get our system back up and running. Where Google limited us to sending 2,000 messages a day, SES allowed us to send 12,000 each day, which was more than enough.
  • Setup was easy. It does require proof of domain control as well as a human review, but while those items are pending you are able to fully set up the system to be able to run once approval is done and not have to bounce between development and production configurations.
  • SES does not seem to have any major issues at the moment, it's an email relay service and it does that job swimmingly.
Amazon SES is great for sending bulk mail, particularly notifications. It is not intended for holding a conversation as there is no way to view the mail that has been sent, so unless you are using a third party system that tracks what mail is being sent, such as a ticketing system like Kayako, you would not want to use it for regular communication.
Arnas Kazlauskas | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I'm working for a hosting company and it's no secret that usual hosting providers do not let their users send mass emails. So when our clients constantly exceed the limits, I suggest them to look into Amazon SES. Most of them thank me because they have never heard about Amazon SES. Also, I've been personally using Amazon SES for over 3 years now and it's a live saver! I've sent thousands of emails without any issues and Amazon SES is exactly what I needed.
  • Amazon SES is a simple service that's not bloated with unnecessary features.
  • It's fast and reliable. You can literally send thousands of emails without any issue.
  • 10 cents for 1000 emails? The price is just simply amazing!
  • It could be more user-friendly for non-tech-savvy people.
  • I've praised that it does not have any unnecessary features. However, some people could use implemented tools.
  • Initial limit is too low but you can lift it with no issues.
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) shines if you just want to send bulk mail and you do not want to pay any monthly fees for the software that you won't use. You pay exactly for what you use -- to send emails. Amazon SES is extremely reliable, I haven't seen any bounces that were on their end.

Speaking about features that are lacking; if you do not have software to send and track all the subscriptions, you may want to look into services that have that implemented already. Personally, I'm using Amazon SES as my SMTP server and Sendy to track all the subscriptions, statistics, reports and all the other features. The price difference between putting several products together and using all-in-one product is huge. Therefore, hands down to Amazon SES for [being] such a great product.
Justin Schroeder | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
We use Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) in a number of our software products to send large quantities of emails on behalf of our customers. Their support of DKIM allows us to send high-quality emails without worrying as much about spam filters. It has also served as a simple solution for sending SMTP email from various websites (think contact forms and the like) where using the computer's native "sendmail" commands are insufficient.

  • Very high send rates. We often send out over 50,000 emails in a matter of minutes (30-40 minutes).
  • Very simple to authorize email sending from an entire domain.
  • You get full control of your emails and are not as strictly bound to a set of policies as you would be with an email "platform" like MailChimp. Of course, that means you have to do more legwork too.
  • You cannot send embedded images (Base64 encoded) in your emails. This is a pretty big gotcha. So if you want to send images along, it's best to store them externally.
  • Virtually zero analytics on your emails. It is up to you to implement open detection, click detection etc.
  • Has no email list storage. That's up to you.
SES is truly a "simple" email sender. It's focused on the actual technology behind sending emails, and sending emails that appear that they genuinely come from a specific domain. This is awesome if you've got some developers to implement the technology to make this kind of service valuable. However, if you don't know how to write code to conform to an API, or how DNS records work – steer clear. This is not for the faint of heart.
D. Marshall Lemcoe Jr. | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our entire organization uses multiple pairs of SMTP credentials from AWS to send all our transactional, marketing, and system monitoring e-mail messages. It makes life for the developers very easy, because they have a single interface to send an e-mail, regardless of the system originating the message.

In addition to its simplicity, the dirt-cheap pricing is almost negligible. The monthly bill for all of our e-mails is roughly $4 per month, and simply cannot be beat by any other SMTP provider.
  • DKIM signing for all messages. This absolutely maximizes the probability of a message reaching a user's inbox, and not the spam folder.
  • API *and* SMTP access, making it possible to connect any system to SES. No matter what programming language or what server, there is always a library for sending e-mail messages that is compatible with SES.
  • SES makes it trivial to send thousands of e-mails from known mail servers. No longer do you have to worry about your server's IP address being blacklisted because it originated too many e-mails.
  • Incredible credential management for increased security. With IAM, you can create API keys (or SMTP credentials) for each individual piece of an infrastructure, making debugging very easy.
  • For users that are not used to semi-complex APIs, the AWS SDK can be a little intimidating. That said, with the SMTP credential feature, the API learning curve can be avoided.
  • It is frustrating that you have to verify each e-mail address or domain name (wildcard) you wish to use in the From: header of the e-mail messages. I understand this is a security feature, but for long-time verified accounts, it would be nice to use arbitrary e-mail addresses and domains.
As I said before, SES is ideal for outsourcing any and all e-mail message origination. Marketing e-mails, new user signup e-mails, and e-mails that notify engineers of service problems are all excellent use cases for SES. For startups, the fact that you get 10,000 free e-mails, just for signing up, makes it a no-brainer when in the early development stages of writing a program. Once the credentials are loaded into the code, you can forget about e-mail origination forever (almost)!
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