- Now let's review the Amazon Simple Email Service.
With Amazon Simple Email Service,
or SES,
we get a service that is ideal
for sending bulk emails at scale,
so think about sending tens of thousands,
hundreds of thousands,
or maybe even millions of emails
to potentially millions of customers
and not only sending those emails,
but ensuring that they get delivered
and tracking the results of that campaign,
and so Simple Email Service helps eliminate
the complexities of delivering email.
If you've ever tried to do this on your own
outside of a service like SES,
then you may have come to figure out
that it's one thing to send an email.
It's another thing to ensure that those emails
actually reach the inbox.
Doing that is a very complex process,
mainly due to validation of the actual address
and ensuring that they get through
various spam filters through the chain of delivery.
And so,
Simple Email Service takes over the burdens
of those complexities so that we don't have
to worry about it and so,
we can use Simple Email Service to send
all kinds of different types of emails.
We may send transactional emails,
so emails that are essentially a receipt
of a particular action,
so a user signs up and then we send them a welcome email.
A user forgets their password and we send them a reset link.
The user purchases something and we send them a receipt,
or we can send marketing emails
where we may target a particular segment
of our user base and send a particular campaign
to that group of customers or we may send emails
to every customer and in that regard,
we're sending potentially upwards of millions of emails
at one time.
We might also have social networking types of emails,
so a user invites their friends to do something
and so you send out emails to maybe
a small group of people based on the actions of one person.
Whatever the case may be,
the idea here is that we're sending email
and we want to ensure that the email actually gets delivered
and we want to track the status of that delivery,
and so we're gonna talk about that here in just a minute.
And so, we can send these emails with an API call.
We can send many, many emails with one API call.
We can also use SMTP if we wanted to.
It just depends on how you want to write your software,
the software that is actually sending the email.
That's totally up to you.
We also get a sandbox environment
so that we can develop against an email service
without actually sending millions of emails
to real people.
Now, like I mentioned earlier,
we can also track the delivery status,
so we would want to know how many emails
actually made it to the inbox,
how many emails were opened,
how many were marked as spam,
how many bounced because of a bad address,
or how many were deleted.
All of that kind of information is automatically collected
and made available to us by the Simple Email Service.
We can also use Simple Email Service
to receive incoming mail.
This is very helpful for handling email programmatically.
If you want to enable your users to email images
or email particular pieces of data,
then we can set up Simple Email Service
to receive that incoming mail and we can have that delivered
to an S3 bucket and then we can also automatically invoke
Lambda functions to do some type of an automated processing
of that email.
Now, when we're using this service,
it's really important to be aware of sending limits.
Sending limits are really put in place to help
ensure that your email doesn't get caught up
in spam filters.
If we start sending a barrage of email immediately,
right out of the gate,
downstream services,
ISPs and email providers could end up flagging
our entire domain as a source of spam
and so we have a number of limits
that you should be aware of and I will refer you
to the documentation for the specific numbers,
but several of them would be first,
a sending quota.
So, we do have the maximum number of emails
that we are allowed to send in a 24 hour period.
We also have the send rate,
which is the number of emails
that we are sending per second.
And those limits,
when we first set up Simple Email Service
for a particular domain,
those limits are set fairly low
and so again,
it's not necessarily for Amazon.
Amazon has the ability to send just about any volume.
This is really to help us sort of get under the radar
of the recipient's email provider, so again
we want to avoid just this massive barrage of emails
and then being flagged as a spam source,
and so by starting at a lower rate of emails,
once those systems begin to trust
that we are sending quality email,
then those limits will be automatically lifted over time.
So again, it is up to you.
It is your responsibility to ensure
that you are adhering to these limits
and that trusting that over time,
as you send quality email,
those limits will be lifted.
So, if you have a need to send transactional emails,
to send bulk emails for marketing campaigns,
social networking emails,
any kind of thing that requires you to send an email
and you need to ensure that its delivered
and then track the status,
then take a look at Amazon's Simple Email Service.