Send transactional emails in a much better way using Amazon Simple Email Service
We were looking for a tool to send bulk promotional and transactional emails without putting them in spam, then we looked over Amazon …
Starting at $0.10 for emails after the first 1,000
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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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Pricing
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
Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Amazon SES?
Amazon SES Integrations
Amazon SES Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
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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Reviews
(1-5 of 5)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
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.
- It offers a custom domain with custom email options.
- Any external email or email service provider is not required to send emails with Amazon Simple Email Service.
- As it is associated with AWS, we do not have to create a separate login, and using its services becomes so easy.
- It helped to send transactional emails in a much better way.
- It's fair pricing is helpful in maintaining budgets.
- Large community support and well documentation make the setup easy.
Amazon Simple Email Service is much better in terms of customization and has fair pricing.
December 04, 2019
Once configured, SES is the reliable, cost-effective choice
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.
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 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.
Although I like the email template capability with these other services, and one of them is actually a customer, the simplicity, reliability, and cost effectiveness of SES keeps it at the top of the list.
Not to mention, we use so many other services at AWS, the integration is obviously very convenient.
Not to mention, we use so many other services at AWS, the integration is obviously very convenient.
November 08, 2019
SES - A cheap and easy way to send emails
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.
- We could easily streamline email response and send email events through SES.
- Since it is a little closed service, it requires a bit of extra effort to glue it with other solutions.
March 02, 2017
Finally 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.
- Our services that leverage SES are entirely white labeled, which increases customer confidence.
SES is a much lower level technical tool than the other solutions we've used in the past with the exception of Mailgun. We've found SES to actually be much easier to use than Mailgun, although not as powerful. A good way to explain the difference between MailChimp, Constant Contact, or Campaign Monitor and SES is that you could literally create those other services using SES. For all I know, they might use SES as their sending agent, while their value add is email lists, HTML composition, and subscribe forms.
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.
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.
- 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.
Amazon SES is bare-bones, insofar as it will not "help" you with the contents of your message. You cannot use variables in the e-mail, it will not automatically track whether or not the recipient opened the mail or not, it will not help with unsubscribe links, and it will not generate and manage web-based copies of the e-mail. That said, it gives the developer full control of the messages.
Pricing, again, is the killer feature here. SES is cheaper than every single e-mail delivery provider I have ever encountered.
Pricing, again, is the killer feature here. SES is cheaper than every single e-mail delivery provider I have ever encountered.