What Is Amazon SES?

When you send an email, you are sending it through some type of outbound email server. That email server might be provided by your Internet service provider (ISP), your company's IT department, or you might have set it up yourself. The email server accepts your email content, formats it to comply with email standards, and then sends the email out over the Internet. The email may pass through other servers until it eventually reaches a receiver (an entity, such as an ISP, that receives the email on behalf of the recipient). The receiver then delivers the email to the recipient. The following diagram illustrates the basic email-sending process.

When you use Amazon SES, Amazon SES becomes your outbound email server. You can also keep your existing email server and configure it to send your outgoing emails through Amazon SES so that you don't have to change any settings in your email clients. The following diagram shows where Amazon SES fits in to the email-sending process.

A sender can generate the email content in different ways. A sender can create the email by using an email client application, or use a program that automatically generates emails, like an application that sends order confirmations in response to purchase transactions.

When you use Amazon SES, you can eliminate the complexity and expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service. Another important factor in any email-sending effort is deliverability—the percentage of your emails that arrive in your recipients' inboxes. ISPs use filters to detect email messages that appear to be spam (unsolicited, undesired emails) and prevent these messages from being delivered. Even if your email is legitimate, an ISP's spam filter could falsely identify your email as spam, and put it in the recipient's junk folder or block it entirely.

If you are not using Amazon SES, you need to take several steps to reduce the likelihood that your emails will be marked as spam. For example, you need to examine the content of your emails to make sure they don't contain material that is typically flagged as questionable. You need to build trust with ISPs so that the ISPs have high confidence that you are sending high-quality emails, and therefore are less likely to block emails coming from you. You need to ensure that you don't send too many emails too soon because sudden spikes in email-sending volume or rate may cause ISPs to block your emails. Amazon SES takes care of all of these tasks for you to maximize the deliverability of your emails.

Another aspect that you would need to manage yourself is to keep track of bounces (email delivery failures that occur, for example, if an email address does not exist) and complaints (emails that recipients mark as spam, for example, by clicking "Mark as spam" in their email client). To receive complaint feedback, you would need to set up feedback loops with individual ISPs. Amazon SES already has feedback loops set up with certain major ISPs, and automatically forwards the information to you. Amazon SES also forwards bounce notifications to you either by email or via Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) and provides you with real-time access to your delivery metrics—the number of emails you have sent and the number that have bounced or generated complaints—to help guide your email-sending strategy.

There are several ways that you can send an email by using Amazon SES. You can use the Amazon SES console, the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) interface, or you can call the Amazon SES API.

Amazon SES integrates seamlessly with other AWS products. For example, you can:

If you are a first-time user of Amazon SES, we recommend that you begin by reading the following sections:

Then you can learn about Amazon SES in more detail by reading the sections listed in the following table:

For more information about Amazon SES terms, see the AWS glossary.