I use Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) in our organization across various projects to reliably send transactional emails from our applications to our users. The business problems addressed are scale and deliverability - making sure we can send as much as we need to and know it will have the highest chance of avoid user's spam folders.
Pros
Simple API
Easy to setup
Realiable deliverabilty
Cons
I think setup could be even simpler
Provide more in-depth solutions for errors
API key access over IAM stuff would be easier
Likelihood to Recommend
I think Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is a great option for many projects, but sometimes it's overkill. It's best when you know you need the ability to send high volume. It's also good for when you are sending mail and notifications where high deliverability is a must-have for your project (like invoices, etc).
VU
Verified User
Team Lead in Engineering (Telecommunications company, 1-10 employees)
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.
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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
Pros
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.
Cons
It is only hard when we need sandbox environment to setup because it is only provide on valid cases.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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.
Pros
Deliverability reports
DKIM and Dmarc integration
Ease of integration with non-Amazon infrastructure
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (Computer Software company, 1-10 employees)
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.
Pros
High percentage of deliverability.
Cost savings.
Cons
They could have a list of bounced emails so it's easy for the sender to delete those emails from databases.
Likelihood to Recommend
It's not for spam. They have a limit for bounced emails, so you must have your email lists clean and updated.
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.
Pros
If you're running your applications in a EC2, the first 62,000 emails are free.
Pay as you go is a great feature.
Cons
No cons! Great service and and easy to use.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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.
Pros
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.
Cons
SES does not seem to have any major issues at the moment, it's an email relay service and it does that job swimmingly.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (Computer Software company, 1-10 employees)
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.
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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)!
