# Amazon SES

> The AWS service apps use to send email in bulk: receipts, alerts, newsletters.

- Level: Intermediate
- Topics: AWS
- URL: https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/amazon-ses/
- In Spanish: [Amazon SES](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/es/amazon-ses/)

**Amazon SES** (Simple Email Service) sends email on behalf of your application. When a shop emails you a receipt, a password reset link or a shipping update, there is a good chance a service like SES is doing the actual sending. Your code hands over the message through an API call or plain SMTP, and SES takes care of delivering it to Gmail, Outlook and every other mailbox.

The hard part of email is not sending it, it is landing in the inbox instead of the spam folder. SES makes you prove you own the sender address or domain, and helps you set up the DNS records that mailbox providers check, such as **DKIM** and SPF. It also reports **bounces** (addresses that do not exist) and **complaints** (people who clicked "this is spam"), so you can stop writing to them.

New accounts start in a sandbox: you can only send to addresses you have verified, with a small daily limit, until you ask AWS for production access. After that the price is roughly ten cents per thousand emails. If your bounce or complaint rates climb too high, AWS can pause your sending to protect everyone else's reputation, so keeping your mailing lists clean is part of the job.

## An analogy

A professional mailroom for your company. You drop off the letters; it stamps them, sends them out, and tells you which ones came back with "no such address".

## Keep in mind

- Sends transactional and marketing email through an API or SMTP.
- You verify the sender domain and set up DKIM and SPF to reach the inbox.
- New accounts start in a sandbox until you request production access.
- High bounce or complaint rates can get your sending paused.

## Go deeper

- [What is Amazon SES? (official docs)](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/Welcome.html)
- [Amazon SES product page](https://aws.amazon.com/ses/)
- [DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DomainKeys_Identified_Mail)

## Related terms

- [API](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/api/): The menu of things one program lets another program ask for.
- [Email protocols](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/email-protocols/): The shared rules, SMTP, IMAP and POP3, that carry an email from one inbox to another.
- [Spam](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/spam/): Unwanted messages sent in bulk: ads, scams and junk you never asked for.
- [DNS](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/dns/): The internet's phone book: it turns names like wikipedia.org into IP addresses.
- [Sandboxing](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/sandboxing/): Running a program in a closed box so it cannot harm anything outside it.