What is Amazon SES(Simple Email Service)?

You have an app built and deployed and now the requirement is to send some emails whenever a certain action is accomplished by the user. This is where Amazon SES(Simple Email Service) will help you. Amazon SES is a cloud email service that is cost-effective and scalable. Developers can easily configure it and send emails from within the application. Amazon SES lets you send emails for various use cases like transactional, marketing and mass communication.

Let\’s first understand the use cases and then we will understand how Amazon SES helps in these use cases.

  • Transaction Emails: These are trigger-based communication from the applications, like reminders, login updates, order details, password flows etc.
  • Marketing Emails: These are personalised communications like promotions, offers and discounts, newsletters etc. Mostly used to promote products or services.
  • Mass Communication: These emails are used as broadcasting emails where notification or an announcement needs to be sent out to a large number of group.

Now we have understood what are the various use cases you have to handle in your applications, let\’s talk about some of the benefits of Amazon SES.

Benefits of Amazon SES

  • Easy to Setup and Integrate: Amazon SES is easy to set up and integrate with your applications. You can set it up quickly using the Amazon SES console. Once it is properly set up, you can send emails by integrating it with your application via SMTP or API calls.
  • Deliverability: Amazon SES use flexible IP deployment and authentication options which help in higher deliverability. You can manage your domain reputation using the reputation dashboard provided by Amazon and can get ahead of any issues. You also have an option to use dedicated IP\’s to optimise your email deliveries.
  • Scalable: Amazon SES allows you to send a large number of emails with minimum effort. With options like SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Email), you can confirm your right to use the domain to send the emails.
  • Compliant: Amazon SES is compliant with various laws like HIPAA and GDPR.
  • Track and Optimise Efficiency: Amazon SES allows you to track metrics like email deliveries, bounces, open and click rates. You can use these metrics to optimise your delivery and efficiency of emails.

This is a short introduction to Amazon SES. In a future post, I will write some of the examples where and how you can use Amazon SES in your application.