Amazon SES celebrates 14 years of email sending and deliverability
On this day, 14 years ago, we launched Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), a highly scalable email sending service that allow businesses and developers to reliably and cost-effectively deliver email from the cloud without having to manage the underlying infrastructure and other operational complexities.
Fast forward to 2025: Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) processes over a trillion email each year for customers worldwide across various industries, from small startups to large enterprises for their transactional and marketing email workloads, including the emails for Amazon retail’s Prime Day events. Today, we take the celebration of SES’s 14th birthday to introduce some of the recently launched features and enhancements to SES features.
Email is a critical communication channel for businesses. With email marketing potentially delivering a $42 ROI for every dollar spent, businesses are eager to send and ensure their emails land in the inbox (called as deliverability). However, Email Service Providers (ESPs) have become more vigilant, implementing advanced filters to block unwanted or suspicious messages. ESPs now require long-standing best practices and bulk-sender requirements that all email senders must adhere to in order to achieve good deliverability and reputation with mailbox providers. Our reputation management systems analyze millions of data points daily (such as IPs, domains, bounces, complaints, and delivery notifications) to help your emails reach their intended inboxes.
SES started as a simple email sending service and as the years passed (since 2011), we became increasingly passionate about email and our vision grew more exciting and innovative. Today, we are not only sending emails; we expanded into email relay and infrastructure features like Mail Manager, we added a secure, managed business email and calendar solution (Amazon WorkMail) to the SES portfolio and released features that help you analyze, monitor and optimize your email deliverability such as Virtual Deliverability Manager (VDM), and introduced Managed Dedicated IP (M-DIP) to help manage and improve your sender reputation. We’ll explore each of these features in more detail later in the post. Industry leaders like Spamhaus recognize SES’s four pillar framework of Prevention, Monitoring, Analysis and Response efforts and effectiveness in maintaining high email deliverability and reputation standards. You can read more about the framework on the official Spamhaus blog post here.
Ensuring Email Resilience & Reliability with Global Endpoints:
An email that is not delivered or an email that is delivered late could be a lost opportunity. Therefore, ensuring your email messages keep flowing is important. Global Endpoints (launched in Dec 2024) is a feature for resilient sending through two commercial AWS Regions. Global Endpoints allows customers to choose a primary and secondary region which accommodate email sending workloads in an equal split under normal circumstances. If either region suffers an impairment, traffic shifts away from the affected Region towards the other, ensuring that email sending continues.
Unlike manual multi-region setups, Global Endpoints synchronizes critical parameters between your two chosen Regions, and highlights remaining differences you must resolve. Once active, the load-balanced sending ensures both Regions have warmed-up IP addresses ready for your workloads, and no manual effort is required to respond to outages.
You can learn more about Global Endpoints by reading this blog here.
Modernizing Email Infrastructure with Amazon SES Mail Manager:
Mail Manager (launched in May 2024) is a set of Amazon SES email relay and gateway features designed to help you with governance, risk management, and compliance goals around all your corporate email workloads. At its core, Mail Manager acts as a routing and delivery relay, effectively managing email traffic and ensuring compliance. It’s like having a digital traffic controller for your emails, efficiently processing rules while seamlessly integrating with your existing email infrastructure whether they are self-hosted or already at AWS. Mail Manager permits standard inspection and enforcement of routing, tracking, archiving, security and compliance rules whether messages are incoming, outgoing, or internal-to-internal. Mail Manager allows simple, cost-effective, and usage-based monitoring and enforcement of corporate policies while creating an easy migration path for application modernization and the wind-down of shadow IT mail servers throughout your organization.
Recently, we announced full lifecycle logging, which means customers have the ability to configure end to end logging for ingress endpoints and rules engine actions to various destinations such as CloudWatch, S3, and Firehose. Organizations can also deliver emails to Q Business for indexing and queries and get a complete visibility into their email communications, enhancing transparency and security. With Mail Manager, you can also setup email journaling, prevent attacks such as email echo spoofing and modernize your email sending by connecting with advanced security solutions like Proofpoint.
You can learn more about Mail Manager in this blog post.
Engagement, Deliverability and Maximizing Email Success with Virtual Deliverability Manager (VDM):
Email deliverability is a complex and multifaceted challenge. Businesses need tools to monitor and optimize their email delivery success rates to make every email count. Virtual Deliverability Manager (VDM) (launched in Sep 2022), is an Amazon SES feature that helps you enhance email deliverability, like increasing inbox deliverability and email conversions, by providing insights into your sending and delivery data, and giving advice on how to fix the issues that are negatively affecting your delivery success rate and reputation. Recently, we enhanced VDM with an adaptive setup, added complaint rate and delivery improvement recommendations.
VDM tracks every email’s journey, uncovering opportunities to improve delivery and engagement rates. Customers can dig deep into deliverability metrics such as bounce, complaint, open, click-through, and successful delivery rates in their accounts at multiple levels such as by sending email address, by email provider, or by SES configuration set. This makes it easy to quickly check the status and trend of sending health.
VDM also analyzes sending configurations and provides automatic recommendations about how to increase sending success. This helps customers make changes such as DKIM configuration (Domain Keys Identified Mail) to increase the likelihood of successful delivery.
Advanced features like BIMI gap detection ensure your emails aren’t just sent, but strategically positioned for maximum impact. The automated complaint rate insights act as an early warning system, helping businesses proactively protect their sender reputation.
If you’d like to learn more, you can check out the blog posts by my colleagues Samuel Koppes (post) and Vinay Ujjini (post).
Reputation Management with Dedicated IPs (managed):
When customers sign up for Amazon SES, their email sending is automatically handled through shared IP addresses. While this shared IP approach is cost-effective and safe, it also means customers don’t have full control over their own sending reputation. The reputation of the IP they send from is determined by the quality and engagement levels of all emails sent from that IP. Some organizations can achieve exceptionally high reputation, and have turned to leasing dedicated IP addresses, where they are the sole sender on that IP. This helps them grow and maintain a positive sending reputation, building trust with ISPs and mailbox providers. Customers estimate how many dedicated IPs they need and request them before use. Dedicated IPs also require a careful “warm-up” process, where senders gradually increase their email volume to avoid triggering spam filters.
Dedicated IPs (Managed) makes it easier to manage dedicated IPs, by automating process of provisioning, leasing, warming up, and managing dedicated IP addresses. Customers can create a managed dedicated IP pool through the API, CLI, or Console and start using it for dedicated sending without having to open support cases. The IP pool automatically scales in and out based on usage, taking into account the specific policies of each ISP. SES tracks the warmup level for each IP in the pool individually for each ISP, ensuring a gradual ramp-up of email volume. The warmup percentage calculation adapts to actual sending patterns, optimizing the warmup schedule. Excess sending is deferred and retried, with early-stage traffic leveraging the shared IP infrastructure.
By automating the management of dedicated IPs, Dedicated IPs (Managed) helps SES customers focus on their email content and strategy, while AWS handles the underlying infrastructure and reputation management. This allows senders to improve their deliverability and ensure more of their emails reach the intended inboxes.
You can learn more about dedicated IPs (managed) by reading the blog post here.
Elevating the Email Experience:
Understanding the evolving needs of our customers, we’ve released a number of new features to make email sending more seamless, secure, and transparent. SES now offers inline email templates that allow developers to seamlessly provide template content directly within their API requests, eliminating the process of managing template resources. We’ve also enhanced tracking capabilities with HTTPS support for custom domains and introduced options to set maximum deliverability times for time-sensitive messages. Our AutoTag enhancements now include insights into TLS version for outgoing messages and customers now have the ability to set custom values in feedback headers, providing better transparency and control. In addition to these improvements, we’ve also e
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