Finally a simple and programatic way to send emails.
March 02, 2017
Finally a simple and programatic way to send emails.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Simple Email Service
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.