Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) | Sending Capabilities

Question 1

What TLS version does Amazon SES use to send email?

Sending Capabilities

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) | Customer Engagement

Answer 1

Amazon SES supports TLS v1.

Question 2

Can I use Amazon SES to send email from my existing applications?

Sending Capabilities

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) | Customer Engagement

Answer 2

Amazon SES allows you to create a private SMTP relay for use with any existing SMTP client software, including software that you develop yourself, or any third-party software that supports SMTP.

For more information, see Using the Amazon SES SMTP Interface to Send Email in the Amazon SES Developers Guide.

Question 3

Can I use Amazon SES to send bulk email?

Sending Capabilities

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) | Customer Engagement

Answer 3

To send bulk email, you can call the SendEmail or SendRawEmail API operations repeatedly for each email you want to send. Software running on Amazon EC2, Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR), or your own servers can compose and deliver bulk emails using Amazon SES in whatever way best suits your needs.

If you already have your own bulk mailing software, it’s easy to update it to deliver through Amazon SES, either by modifying the software to directly call Amazon SES, or by reconfiguring it to deliver email through an Amazon SES SMTP relay. For more information about the Amazon SES SMTP interface, see Using the Amazon SES SMTP Interface in the Amazon SES Developer Guide.

Question 4

Can Amazon SES send emails with attachments?

Sending Capabilities

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) | Customer Engagement

Answer 4

Amazon SES supports many popular content formats, including documents, images, audio, and video.

Note: For your own safety and that of your customers, Amazon SES scans every attachment that you send for viruses and malware.

You can an email client that supports SMTP to send email with attachments. When you configure a client to send outgoing email through Amazon SES, the client constructs the appropriate MIME parts and email headers before sending the message.

You can also send email with attachments programmatically. To include an attachment in your email, construct a new multipart email message. In this message, include a MIME part that contains an appropriate Content-Type header, along with the MIME-encoded content. Next, use the Content-Disposition header to specify whether the content is to be displayed inline or treated as an attachment.

Once you have constructed your message, you can send it using the SendRawEmail API; you can also use the AWS Software Development Kits (SDKs) or a third-party library such as boto3 for Python.

Question 5

Can I reserve dedicated IP addresses for my Amazon SES email sending?

Sending Capabilities

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) | Customer Engagement

Answer 5

Yes. Dedicated IPs are available at an extra cost. To request a dedicated IP Address, open an SES Sending Limits Increase Case in Support Center. In the ticket, specify that you want to purchase dedicated IPs in the Use Case Description field. For pricing information, see Amazon SES Pricing.

Question 6

Can I specify a dedicated IP address when I send certain types of email?

Sending Capabilities

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) | Customer Engagement

Answer 6

If you have leased several dedicated IP addresses to use with your Amazon SES account, you can use the dedicated IP pools feature to create groups (pools) of those IP addresses. You can then associate each pool with a configuration set; when you send emails using that configuration set, those emails will only be sent from the IP addresses in the associated pool.

To learn more, see Creating Dedicated IP Pools in the Amazon SES Developer Guide.

Question 7

Can I test Amazon SES responses without sending email to real recipients?

Sending Capabilities

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) | Customer Engagement

Answer 7

The Amazon SES mailbox simulator provides an easy way to test your sending rate and generic email responses, including bounces and complaints, without sending to actual recipients. Emails to the mailbox simulator do not affect your bounce and complaint metrics, and do not count against your sending quota.

For more information about the Amazon SES mailbox simulator, see Testing Amazon SES Email Sending in the Amazon SES Developer Guide.

Question 8

Can I use Amazon SES for email-to-text SMS delivery?

Sending Capabilities

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) | Customer Engagement

Answer 8

Many mobile phone carriers offer an SMTP-to-SMS gateway. Amazon SES users can send text-only emails to the emails addresses associated with these gateways, which will in turn be delivered to the recipients’ mobile phones as SMS messages.

However, in order to successfully use an SMS gateway, you must know several pieces of information, including:

The recipient’s mobile phone number

The recipient’s mobile phone carrier

The domain name of the carrier’s SMS gateway (such as sms.carriername.com)

If SMS messages are part of your marketing or communications plan, we recommend using Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS). When sending SMS messages through Amazon SNS, you only need to know the recipient’s mobile phone number.