AWS SES sends transactional messages, marketing emails, and notifications on a scalable infrastructure. AWS SES provides 3 authentication mechanisms DKIM, SPF, and DMARC. These are the security mechanisms for the authentication of the users on SES.
AWS SES has many email features that let the users:
- Create an Identity
- View Account Dashboard
- Use Suspension List
- Create Configuration Sets
- Create SMTP Credentials
We will discuss all these in detail. Other features include email templates, notifications, queries, etc.
How to Use AWS SES?
The users cannot access the AWS SES features without an authentic SES identity. So, to understand the use of AWS SES, the users need to create an Amazon SES Identity. Search for the SES or Simple Email Service in the AWS services.
Create an Identity
The first interface of the AWS SES will ask the user to Create an identity because the AWS SES service can not be accessed and used without creating and authenticating the identity. Click on the Create identity button to start the process.
After that, select the identity type as either Domain or Email address. For example, we select the domain. Enter an authentic and verified domain name in the space.
Click on the Create identity button.
In this way, an identity is created.
View Account Dashboard
The user can monitor every SES account activity, like account status, daily sending quota, AWS region used for sending emails, etc.
On the Account dashboard, the user can view the number of emails sent, remaining emails, and sending quota.
Moreover, the user can view the number of emails sent in the form of a graph. There is also a button named View in CloudWatch on the top to let the users directly view the CloudWatch report. This service is integrated with AWS CloudWatch to view every detail of the sent, received, rejected, bounced, and complaint emails.
Opening the CloudWatch provides the user with a detailed overview.
There are separate graphs for emails sent, rejected, bounced, and complaint emails, exactly like the above graph.
Use Suppression List
The user can add and remove email addresses through the Suppression list feature of AWS SES.
Create Configuration Sets
Users can create configuration sets in AWS Simple Email Service through the Create set button.
Name the set and add the other required details to create the set.
In this way, the configuration set is created.
Create SMTP Credentials
Users can also create SMTP credentials through AWS SES. To create SMTP credentials, click on the Create SMTP credentials button.
This requires creating an IAM user first. Create the IAM user directly by selecting Create user and then adding a user name.
The IAM user is created in this way very easily.
There is a button named Download Credentials through which the user can download the credentials (username and password) on the system.
The username and password are displayed only once after the creation of the IAM user account. So the user can unhide the credentials and view them once.
Explained above is a brief description of the usage of some most commonly used features of AWS Simple Email Service.
Conclusion
AWS SES mainly sends and receives email messages, marketing emails, and notifications. The users first have to create an Identity on AWS SES and then access the features of this AWS service. Other than sending and receiving emails, users can perform other operations, like they can monitor all the activities on SES, like the number of messages sent, received, rejected, or bounced, and can create SMTP credentials.
