Amazon SES
Managed service for sending and receiving email from applications, over SMTP or an API.
Verified against AWS documentation · 2026-08-24
Key facts
- 01Verify the sending identity first — an email address, or a domain via DKIM CNAME records, which covers every address on it
- 02New accounts start in the sandbox: 200 emails per 24h, 1/sec, verified recipients only — production access is requested per Region
- 03Reputation is yours: bounce ≥5% or complaint ≥0.1% puts the account under review; 10% / 0.5% can pause sending
- 04Limits: 50 recipients per message, 40 MB max size (v2 API/SMTP), quotas counted per recipient and scoped per Region
Exam triggers
Phrases and scenarios that point here.
- "Transactional email", "order confirmations", "password resets", "receipts" → SES
- App must email real customers, not just alert operators → SES, not SNS
- Automatically capture bounces and complaints → configuration set + event destination (SNS/EventBridge)
- Email only arrives for a handful of test addresses → account is still in the SES sandbox
Not this service
- Fan-out notifications to subscribers or systems (HTTP, SMS, Lambda) → SNS
- Hosting employee mailboxes → WorkMail
- Campaign orchestration, journeys, segmentation → Amazon Connect outbound campaigns
Use cases
- 01Transactional mail from an application — signup verification, password resets, receipts — sent from Lambda or ECS via the SES v2 API
- 02Ops and CI/CD mail: nightly build digests, expiring-certificate warnings, backup failure alerts, without running Postfix on an EC2 box nobody patches
- 03Inbound processing — receipt rules drop mail into S3 and trigger Lambda, turning invoices@ or support@ into an event-driven pipeline instead of a mailbox someone has to remember to check
- 04Bulk sends to a list you already own, with the account-level suppression list and event feed doing list hygiene automatically
- 05Multi-tenant SaaS sending from each customer's own domain, using sending authorization so a tenant's own verified identity is what signs the mail
How it's charged
- 01Charged per recipient, not per message — one email to 50 people is 50 billable sends, and 50 against your daily quota
- 02À la carte is $0.10 per 1,000 outbound emails; new and dormant accounts now default to the Essentials plan at $0.16 per 1,000 unless you switch
- 03Attachments bill separately at $0.12 per GB of outbound data — link to S3 instead of attaching the PDF
- 04Inbound is its own line item: $0.10 per 1,000 emails received, plus $0.09 per 1,000 incoming 256 KB chunks
- 05Dedicated IPs are a flat monthly fee ($24.95 per IP standard, or $15 per account plus per-email for managed) — only worth it at sustained high volume
