How to Use Amazon SES as your SMTP Service?
How to Use Amazon SES as your SMTP Service? Send Bulk Emails For Cheap!
How can you make use of Amazon SES as your SMTP Service? Send Bulk Emails For Cheap – Follow along for this amazing AWS SES Tutorial.
Hi, friends. I am Md. Istiqur Rahman.
How are you? In this awesome lecture, we will learn together how to configure Amazon’s simple email services. We will learn how to start sending emails from today. So, stay tuned, homies! Let’s start together.
Let’s explain what Amazon SES is
Okay, very nice! When you want to send emails, when do you want to email marketing campaigns, you need an SMTP server. This SMTP server is responsible for your email marketing campaign and sending your regular or transactional emails.
You can use Google SMTP as an example. I mean Gmail. You can use services like
- SendGrid
- Mailgun
- Mailchimp
Whatever service you want, and in Amazon, we have an SMTP service called Amazon SES or simple Email Service.
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Pre-requisite for Amazon SES Setup
Before we start, you need to know that you need a domain name to go with Amazon SES. In general, whenever you want to build an SMTP server or use an SMTP service, you need a domain name.
Would you mind getting a domain from
- GoDaddy
- Namecheap
- Bluehost
Whatever domain provider you want to continue with me in this lecture.
Sign In To Amazon Simple Email Service
Here we are inside Amazon Web Services.
If you don’t have an account, please sign up and continue with me. I don’t want to waste time now signing up for an account. Clicking now on my account, I will go to the AWS management console.
To sign, in I will enter my password and log in.
Enter AWS Simple Email Service
Here we are now! Go to services, and search for “ses,” and you can find the simple email service menu.
Click on it to open the SES management dashboard.
Add Domain Name For Amazon SES Setup
The first thing you need to do is to add your domain to SES. So click on domains, then click verify a new domain. Enter your domain. Let’s enter my dummy domain. Click generate DKIM settings so we can add DKIM values. Click verify this domain.
Verify Domain Name On AWS SES
It will now give you some records to add to your DNS zone. Let’s now go to GoDaddy and click on my domains so I can add these values. The idea seems very simple to me. Comment below what do you think about it 😊
We need to go to DNS management on my sample domain. Just click where it says Manage DNS.
Now you need to add the text record. Copy and then go to DNS management, add a text record, paste the hostname, get a text value, copy it, and p Always copy everything except the domain name.
Set DKIM in AWS Simple Email Service
Let’s copy the DKIM record: copy everything except the domain name. Create now a cname record. Just copy the DKIM value from the AWS SES panel and paste it on your DNS management the same way as before. Could you do this for all records we have?
Setup MX Record on Amazon SES
If you also want to set the MX record, you can select the email server record for your domain. After you set this, click the close button, and your domain will be verified soon.
I did this before from my sample domain. You can see that this sample domain verification is done already. You might need to add your domain and wait maybe 20 minutes to half an hour or sometimes more. AWS or Amazon will verify your domain. So that’s it for domain verification.
I have already added my verified domain. After verifying your domain, you will send only verified email addresses because you will be set in the sandbox.
AWS SES Email Sending Statistics
Let’s go to sending statistics. You’ll notice by default that you are set in the sandbox. You can only send verified emails and only 200 emails per day.
How To Extend Email Sending Limits in Amazon Simple Email Service
You can see that you can select the mail type and other things. Just fill up this form for your website if you have filled up these requests and click Submit. Please describe why you want to increase this limit and so on. After clicking on Submit and maybe after 24 hours to 48 hours, Amazon will reply and open the limit.
You can see it in my US West Oregon, and I opened the limit, so now I can send around 50,000 emails per day. You can see 50 thousand emails remaining.
So it’s very simple –
- Just add your domain
- Submit a request to open the limit
- After 24 hours or 48 hours, Amazon will open the limit for you.
- You will have a limit of 14 emails per second and 50,000 emails per day.
Amazon SES Pricing
Now you may be wondering about Amazon SES pricing. What’s nice about Amazon is that it’s almost the cheapest SMTP or email service on this planet.
If we go now to Amazon SES pricing, you can see that we can send around 1,000 emails for only 0.1 dollars. This means that we can send 10,000 emails for 1 dollar. We can send 100,000 emails for $10. Awesome service!
You may tell me that I can’t afford this; I can’t pay every day $10 for 100,000 emails. You can build your SMTP server, open the limits, pay around 20 to 40 dollars per month to get a VPS server for you, and send 100,000 emails every day.
Do you see the difference? If you are interested in building your SMTP server, please keep an eye on my original blogs.
Let’s Start With AWS SES SMTP Settings
After we added our domain, we opened our limit. Now we need to get the SMTP settings or credentials that we will use to send an email. How to do this? Let’s continue.
Go here to SMTP settings, click on this, and click create my SMTP credentials.
Now click create here, click show user SMTP credentials, and here we are.
Let’s open a notepad. As an example, copy the credentials.
Now you also need the port and the host. What do you do to find this? Let’s go back to SMTP settings again. You can see your ports and server name. So this is our configuration, and we got our SMTP settings, okay?
Save this information, and you can use it now in any email marketing software or WordPress.
Let’s see what we have here
- You can see the sending statistics I showed you this before.
- You can see deliveries.
- Drags
- Bounces
- Complaints
- You can see how many emails you sent per day.
- We can go to the reputation dashboard and see your reputation.
It’s very important to be healthy if you want your emails to go into the inbox folder. If you have many bounce rates, you may be blacklisted or blocked even by Amazon.
Conclusion
This is almost the basic configuration of Amazon SES and how to start working with email marketing with Amazon.