If you have parachuted, SES is the AWS SMTP service. We use this SMTP connected to Mautic, due to its quality and price.
Although, over the years it seemed AWS wasn't caring about the SES product. For real. The impression is the only reason for SES is sending emails out of EC2 and thus create some kind of anti-spam control instead of improving the resources regarding deliverability, improvement actions that were always promoted by its biggest competitors, such as Sendgrid / Twilio and Sparkpost.
The SES panel has not changed in the past 4 years. The good thing is that a lot of our content, classes, and articles about SES didn’t need to be updated frequently because there was practically nothing new.
The great advantage of SES is price and billing format. Only $ 1 for every 10k email submissions. Far away from any other SMTP provider. Which becomes a great advantage, especially for those who send a lot.
The billing format is very interesting because it is by use. The most popular email marketing services, such as Mailchimp, charge a monthly fee regardless of whether you used sent or not, and Amazon SES if you don't use it, you don't pay 🙂
Another great advantage of SES is the quality of its IPs. They are always very strict with regard to bounce and spam complaints, Amazon blocks anyone who exceeds 5% of bounce.
Now with the Email and cross-channel communication market striding with Twilio buying Sendgrid, Sparkpost receiving a contribution of U $ 180M, Twitter buying a newsletter company, and now Facebook planning its own.
AWS needed to show that it is still interested in multichannel communication and marketing automation, even to fuel its Pinpoint marketing automation product.
For those who remember the old console, the one below is a big improvement, especially for us at Powertic who deal with company education about email. Do not send unsolicited emails, do not buy a list, perform email validation (we even have a product if you need it), in short, that whole review.
New, more intuitive panel will help less technical users to understand SES
The new panel has very evident indicators with the acceptable limits of bounce and complaint rate, now nobody can complain that they did not know. Before that information was hidden in articles.
Resources for more technical users too
A major request was that SES be DMARC compliant, which allows administrators to better control possible loopholes for spammers using the company's domain or to identify opportunities for improved email delivery.
The configuration set part is now allowed to choose a default configuration. This part is widely used to define dedicated IP for each sending. For example, if you have marketing and transactional shipping. With a configuration set, it is possible to send transactional email via one IP and marketing email via the other and manage the reputations of both individually so that one does not disturb the reputation of the other.
We hope AWS continues to improve its SES product, we love to pay for use instead of plans 😉
The complete news with all the improvements:
https://aws.amazon.com/pt/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/amazon-ses-console-opt-in/