How to get AWS SES to work well without a dedicated IP for SMTP

Question

I see in multiple places that Amazon believes that dedicated IP addresses for sending email are not necessary, Here for example. However, I can't find any more details. I would like to switch to SES but there are so many stories online where people believe their email is blocked by spam lists that I'm very hesistant.

Here is my question: Nick from AWS Support says what I have posted below. What is the "mitigation"?

Please provide a more full story about why it is OK to send large numbers of legitimate emails on AWS SES and not be concerned about sharing IP addresses of the sending SMTP server.

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Thank you for the report. We mitigated the issue as of Apr. 04 03:19 UTC. Let us know if you have experienced any rejects dated since.

Regards- Nick
Posted by Nick@AWS on April 6, 2016 5:37:09 PM PDT

Answer 1

Nick from AWS Support says what I have posted below. What is the "mitigation"?

Mitigation of a black listed IP means they took corrective action by either a) having the IP rechecked by the service that black listed it in the first place, thereby removing it from the black list, and/or b) retiring that IP number from being used by the affected SMTP server. In either case, those steps would resolve an IP black listing issue.

How to get AWS SES to work well with out a dedicated IP for SMTP?

AWS SES takes great care in monitoring bounces, complaints, etc and in preventing spammers from abusing its server for one specific reason: To prevent their IP addresses from being blacklisted. They obviously have to do this if they are going to have a viable, reliable way of sending customer emails from SES.

I think SES does everything reasonably possible to prevent their service from getting blacklisted. They have to manage this well, in order to maintain good deliverability rates in the future.

If SES works for you, then I would not be too concerned about lack of dedicated IPs.

As a sender, if you want to insure your email gets delivered, you still need to focus on overall deliverability. See Improving Deliverability with Amazon SES

NOTE: The greatest risk with SES is that they shut down your service if you cross one of their message bounce thresholds. We had an automated test scenario running that was sending emails to a non-existent email address at Hotmail. They shutdown/restricted our access to SES for a few days till we sorted it out. Be careful regarding testing and SES.