Email receiving with Amazon SES - Amazon Simple Email Service

Email receiving with Amazon SES

Besides using Amazon SES to manage your email sending, you can also configure SES to receive email on behalf of one or more of your domains. As the email receiver, SES handles underlying mail-receiving operations, such as communicating with other mail servers, scanning for spam and viruses, blocking mail from untrusted sources (addresses on the block lists of either Spamhaus or SES), and accepting mail for recipients in your domain.

The extent of processing on your received email is determined by the custom instructions you specify. These instructions come in two forms:

  • Receipt rules (recipient-based control) provide the finest granularity of control over incoming email. Receipt rules can do advanced processing such as deliver incoming mail to an Amazon S3 bucket, publish it to an Amazon SNS topic, send it to Amazon WorkMail, or automatically send bounce messages when messages are to specific email addresses, and more.

  • IP address filters (IP-based control) provide a broad level of control and are simple to setup. These filters allow you to explicitly block or allow all messages from specific IP addresses or IP address ranges.

To get started with learning about email receiving, setting it up, and implementation using either receipt rules or IP address filters, first read through Email receiving concepts & use cases to get an overview of how it works and the different ways you can use it. Next, Setting up email receiving will guide you through the email receiving set up prerequisites. Then, the Email receiving console walkthroughs will guide you through the wizards used for configuring receipt rules and IP address filters.

Note

Email receiving can only be used if your account is in an AWS Region where SES supports email receiving. See SES supported email receiving regions.