AWS Launches Simple, Bulk Email Service Amazon SES

Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing business of Amazon.com has announced a new bulk email offering, called Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES). The cloud-based service is aimed towards developers and businesses who don’t want to build a in-house email product but want to call upon a powerful service to send large volumes of emails.

The advantage of using Amazon SES is that it integrates with other AWS, such as hosting service EC2, Amazon S3 and others. The email service if offered for free, but Amazon will charge fees for the number of emails sent plus data transfers. Pricing for Amazon SES is $0.10 per thousand email messages sent. Additionally, a customer can send 2,000 email messages for free each day when these emails originate from Amazon EC2 or recently launched AWS Elastic Beanstalk (data transfer fees may still apply if a customer exceeds their AWS free monthly bandwidth allowance).

Amazon SES uses content filtering technologies to scan a business’s outgoing email messages to help ensure that the content meets ISP standards. The email message is then either queued for sending or routed back to the sender for corrective action.

To help businesses improve the quality of email communications with their customers, Amazon SES offers a built-in feedback loop, which includes notifications of bounce backs, failed and successful delivery attempts, and spam complaints.