TrustRadius
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).https://media.trustradius.com/product-logos/QJ/HA/LZS0ERX0JRD2.pngTrue to its title: 'Simple' Email ServiceAmazon 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,10,SES has reduced development time and abstracted away a lot of technical difficulties for sending templated emails and hence increased productivityAmazon SES a great business solutionWe 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,10,Email marketing has better ROI than social media marketing At least 3x ROI,Mandrill,MailChimpAmazon Simple Email Service is powerful, flexible, and valuableI'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,10,Lowered costs Quicker turnaround on unique feature requests,SendGrid Marketing Email, Sendgrid Transactional Email and MailChimpSES is great low cost no frills email platform. Suited for marketing emails more so than transaction emailsI 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,8,Saves me around $75/month over using other compeititors,,SendGrid Marketing Email, MailgunSimple E-mail Service- may not be simple, but well worth it!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.,7,Our cost of sending emails is negligible. We have very high confidence in our email delivery. The speed of sending is awesome. We have sent out thousands of emails in minutes - once we sent out mail as a shout out to dormant users- and it worked very well.,Sendgrid Transactional Email and MailChimp,WordPress, Yoast Wordpress SEO Plugins, SkypeAbout SES at a glance.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.,7,Implemented the email service in minutes as the SDK is very easy to implement a sample. Could send out thousands of emails in minutes and was able to send out bigger attachments in the email. Engaging with users helped us in winning more number of users to install our App.,Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) and Amazon Elastic MapReduce,Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Mobile AnalyticsSES Sends Mail Like a ChampWe 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.,8,SES allowed us to send thousands of messages without any major concern of hitting sending limits.Send thousands of emails -- pay a buckI'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.,10,I've reduced my spendings; saved hundreds of dollars switching from all-in-one tool to Amazon SES ROI has increased due to more sales and fewer spendings. The increase in sales; I'm able to send more emails and more reliably.,MailChimp and Sendy,Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), Slack, TrelloFinally a simple and programatic way to send emails.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.,10,We've been able to quickly implement mailchimp-like email sending into our products (our customer can send mass emails to their constituents) at a fraction of the cost of more robust services like mailchimp, all while making our product look more professional. Our services that leverage SES are entirely white labeled, which increases customer confidence.,Mailgun, MailChimp, Constant Contact and Campaign Monitor,Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Rackspace, Amazon Relational Database Service, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)Amazon SES - Set It Once, And Then Forget About It! And It's Almost Free!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.,8,All positive things. The fact that we can send tens of thousands of e-mails per month for less than $5 is incredible. Find a better price for something even remotely as high-quality as SES. SES provides a set-and-forget way of handling e-mail. Drop in the credentials, and your developers will never have to mess with it again.,Sendgrid Transactional Email, Mandrill, Mailgun and MailChimp,DigitalOcean, Laravel PHP Framework, CodeIgniter, Redis, MariaDB, Docker, HAProxy, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
  3. Amazon SES Reviews
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Amazon Simple Email Service
33 Ratings
Score 8.7 out of 101
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Amazon SES Reviews

Amazon SES
33 Ratings
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Score 8.7 out of 101
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No photo available
July 01, 2019

Amazon SES Review: "True to its title: 'Simple' Email Service"

Verified User
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
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.
Read this authenticated review
Luis Escoffié profile photo
July 23, 2018

User Review: "Amazon SES a great business solution"

Luis Escoffié
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
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.
Read Luis Escoffié's full review
No photo available
July 25, 2018

Review: "Amazon Simple Email Service is powerful, flexible, and valuable"

Verified User
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
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.

Read this authenticated review
Dave Stack profile photo
July 05, 2018

Amazon SES Review: "SES is great low cost no frills email platform. Suited for marketing emails more so than transaction emails"

Dave Stack
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
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.
Read Dave Stack's full review
Anindya Chatterjee profile photo
January 31, 2018

Amazon SES Review: "Simple E-mail Service- may not be simple, but well worth it!"

Anindya Chatterjee
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
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.
Read Anindya Chatterjee's full review
No photo available
December 04, 2017

Amazon SES Review: "About SES at a glance."

Verified User
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
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.
Read this authenticated review
No photo available
August 17, 2017

Amazon SES Review: "SES Sends Mail Like a Champ"

Verified User
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
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.
Read this authenticated review
Arnas Kazlauskas profile photo
April 17, 2017

Amazon SES Review: "Send thousands of emails -- pay a buck"

Arnas Kazlauskas
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
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.
Read Arnas Kazlauskas's full review
Justin Schroeder profile photo
March 02, 2017

Amazon SES Review: "Finally a simple and programatic way to send emails."

Justin Schroeder
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller
Review Source
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.
Read Justin Schroeder's full review
D. Marshall Lemcoe Jr. profile photo
February 24, 2017

Review: "Amazon SES - Set It Once, And Then Forget About It! And It's Almost Free!"

D. Marshall Lemcoe Jr.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
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)!
Read D. Marshall Lemcoe Jr.'s full review

Amazon SES Scorecard Summary

Likelihood to Recommend (33)
8.7

About 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 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).

Categories:  Transactional Email

Amazon SES Integrations

Amazon SES Technical Details

Operating Systems: Unspecified
Mobile Application:No