Verifiying emails with AMAZON SES

Question

I am trying to understand how a market mailing system such as SES works. Basically it says I need to verify my email address. I have added some CNAME to my domain and it seems validated now.

Though a few questions:

• Do i need to create every email address I need ([email protected], [email protected], ...)at my domain name hosting provider which is also handling my emails accounts ? Does validating the domain allow SES to create custom emails directly in the cloud on AWS ?
• Link to previous question: does SES hosts emails ? or should I get a specific plan for each email account at my provider ?

I am a bit struggling to understand what SES offers. At first I thought SES would replace my email services, but it seems it only sends compaign and not much more ...

Answer 1

The first step that SES requires is that you verify your email address that you are sending email from.

Next step is to setup domain validation in Route53 or your DNS server.

The final step is to open an Amazon Support Case and request increasing your sending limits. This will allow you to then use SES to send email normally up to your sending limit from any email address in your domain. This limit is typically 50,000 messages per day on first request, but can be much larger. When you open your support case specify what you need. The goal here is to prevent spammers from using SES. Hint: Use a real credit card for your account as this simplifies Amazon verifying your identity.The name on the credit card that matches the domain owner is even better.

The entire process is easy to complete.

For regular email, the user front end is Amazon WorkMail. You should also set this up, but you can also continue to use Outlook 365, etc.

Answer 2

SES is basically a high-volume, managed SMTP server. It will accept email from your application, and deliver it to the intended recipient. Because AWS is very strict about preventing abuse, you have a much better chance of having your emails delivered properly to your end users.

If you're sending from an application - i.e. all emails come from something like [email protected], you can verify just that single sending email. Based on your question, you will probably want to verify your entire domain, which will make the process easier.

One of the benefits of SES is the integration with other services. So you can build code to automatically handle bounces and complaints - if you send an email to an address that no longer exists, you get a bounce message and can use that via SNS & your application to unsubscribe or delete that account.

Note that SES is just sending emails at this point. You can configure SES to receive emails, but that means it will take ALL emails to your domain.