Automated emails are one way to guarantee that you and your clients maintain a steady and consistent relationship throughout a business transaction. These emails include updates on order status, notifications of purchases or shipments, and notices of policy changes. Any messages sent at this time must be authentic and free from any kind of compromise.

You need a reliable and cost-effective infrastructure for this task if you want to maintain your customers' trust and confidentiality.

Using Amazon SES, you can send your clients transactional emails, marketing emails, and any other sort of top-notch content. So what exactly is Amazon SES? Read on to find out.

What is Amazon SES?

A cloud-based email service called Amazon Simple Email Service allows users to send both transactional and bulk emails.

It is an email service provider that can be integrated into any application to send transactional or marketing emails. Additionally, Amazon SES supports a range of deployments, including those using dedicated, shared, or owned IP addresses. You can incorporate email functionality into an AWS-based application using this pay-per-use service.

Why use it?

To guarantee high email deliverability, you can use Amazon SES. Additionally, this infrastructure is dependable for users as it is reasonably priced and supports three different types of authentication (DMARC, SPF, and DKIM).

With Amazon SES, you can both retrieve and monitor your sending activity. Services like Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon EC2, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS Lambda, Amazon Route 53, Amazon S3, AWS SNS, and Amazon WorkMail are easy to integrate with Amazon SES.

You can send up to 62,000 emails for free each month through an app hosted by Amazon EC using the Simple Email Service.

Amazon SES cost

Remember that the first 62,000 emails sent each month are free if your app is running on Amazon's (EC2 or Elastic Beanstalk) infrastructure.

Amazon's "pay for what you use" policy is applicable in all other situations.

  • You might be charged up to $0.1 for every 1,000 emails sent and $0.12 for each GB of attachments if you send more than 62,000 emails.
  • The price will remain $0.1 per 1,000 emails sent plus $0.12 for each GB of attachments if your app is not hosted on an Amazon server.

Additional monthly fees of $24.95 apply if you require a dedicated IP address for increased security.

Pros and Cons of Amazon SES

Here, let's consider the benefits and drawbacks of Amazon SES services.

Pros

  • High sending rates and high deliverability and dependability
  • When everything is in place, the services are at the best quality-to-price ratio there is no need for additional maintenance.
  • Amazon SES is a simple sending service, not a marketing platform.
  • Amazon SES offers both SMTP and API integration.

Cons

  • It only functions as an email-sending tool; it does not provide additional features like drag-and-drop templates, A/B testing, or in-depth analytics. For easier testing and more features try MailSlurp.

How to Set up Amazon SES

If you've decided to use it or at least test it out, here are the steps to setting up Amazon SES.

  • You will have access to all Amazon services once you create an AWS account and choose a free plan as your initial option.
  • Select Simple Email Service from the list of services in the AWS Management Console.
  • Today, it's important to confirm the accuracy of email addresses. The Amazon SES console is the simplest way to validate an email address. It doesn't call for any coding expertise.
  • After completing verification successfully, proceed to email sending. You can employ SMTP or an API, as we have already mentioned. At this point, you should be very specific about how you want to send your emails.
  • Connect it to a server that hosts your app (Postfix, Exim, and other examples are good candidates). Getting Amazon SES SMTP credentials and integrating your email client or program both take very little effort. These choices may also work well for people who are not developers.

Amazon SES with WordPress

You need to get the SMTP credentials because your Amazon SES instance needs to be activated in production mode. WordPress can be integrated with Amazon SES in one of two ways to send newsletters or notifications:

Install the correct plugin. WP Mail SMTP is an additional choice. It offers seamless Amazon SES integration.

The addition of some code is a more technical choice. WordPress can use your SMTP and PHPMailer because it is based on PHP.

In the functions.php file of your theme, add the following code:

Email Testing with Amazon SES

Before switching to the production environment, send test emails using whichever Amazon SES integration method you decide on. With the Mailbox Simulator and Sandbox mode, Amazon SES offers you two testing options while taking care of your actual recipients.

Conclusion

Amazon SES is the best option if you require an email-sending solution that is dependable and scalable. Understanding the specifics of how it is used requires time, effort, and some technical expertise.

For an easier solution use MailSlurp's free email API. Create custom domains with queue backed email sending and receiving. Use custom SDKS and REST API to control email accounts with MailSlurp.

For more posts about SES see the AWS tag