Amazon introduces Simple Email Service

Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, has announced Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), a scalable and cost-effective bulk and transactional email-sending service for businesses and developers.

The company says Amazon SES eliminates the complexity and expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service.

The service integrates with other AWS services, making it easy to send emails from applications being hosted on services such as Amazon EC2. With Amazon SES there is no long-term commitment, minimum spend or negotiation required - businesses can utilize a free usage tier, and after that, enjoy low fees for the number of emails sent plus data transfer.

Amazon SES enables businesses to benefit from the years of experience and sophisticated email infrastructure Amazon.com has built to serve its own large-scale customer base. Through a simple API call, businesses can now access the scalable email infrastructure to communicate to their customers.

For high email deliverability, Amazon SES uses content filtering technologies to scan a business's outgoing email messages to help ensure that the content meets ISP standards. The email message is then either queued for sending or routed back to the sender for corrective action. To help businesses further improve the quality of email communications with their customers, Amazon SES provides a built-in feedback loop, which includes notifications of bounce backs, failed and successful delivery attempts, and spam complaints.

"Customers have consistently asked us for the ability to send large quantities of high-quality email from Amazon EC2. Amazon SES makes it very easy for businesses to send email from applications running on Amazon EC2 and other AWS services," said Adam Selipsky, Vice President, Amazon Web Services. "With Amazon SES, businesses no longer have to worry about the details of building and maintaining their own email-sending solution or negotiating and paying for expensive outside email services. Instead, they can focus on improving customer communication and reducing costs."

Pricing for Amazon SES is US$0.10 per thousand email messages sent. Additionally, a customer can send 2,000 email messages for free each day when these emails originate from Amazon EC2 or AWS Elastic Beanstalk (data transfer fees may still apply if a customer exceeds their AWS free monthly bandwidth allowance).