Amazon Announces Amazon Simple Email Services

Amazon Web Services LLC, an Amazon.com company, today announced Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), a highly scalable and cost-effective bulk and transactional email-sending service for businesses and developers. 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. To get started using Amazon SES, visit http://aws.amazon.com.

Building large-scale email solutions to send marketing and transactional messages is often a complex and costly challenge for businesses. To increase the percentage of emails that are successfully delivered, businesses must deal with hassles such as email server management, network configuration, and meeting rigorous Internet Service Provider (ISP) standards for email content. Additionally, many third-party email solutions require contract and price negotiations, as well as significant up-front costs.

Amazon SES eliminates these challenges and 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 a high-quality, scalable email infrastructure to efficiently and inexpensively 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."

Amazon is able to pass on the efficiencies of its scale to customers, and pricing for Amazon SES is only $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).

Neustar, Inc is a managed services provider that enables seamless connectivity across networks, technologies and applications for carriers and enterprises. "Amazon SES has been invaluable to our business by letting us no longer worry about email deliverability - just as Amazon SQS lets us do so for our own queuing, Amazon S3 lets us do so with file storage, and Amazon RDS for databases," said Patrick Lightbody, Director of Product Management at Neustar, Inc. "For our self-service SaaS business, the email signup process must be flawless. Any delay in delivery can have significant impact on our signup rates, which require email verification, and Amazon SES has already improved those signup rates by about 10%."

"Reliable email deliverability has become more of a challenge as spam volumes have increased and ISP's have rightly become more aggressive in their efforts to shield end users from unsolicited messages," said George Cook, Vice President of Technical Architecture, 42 Entertainment, a digital entertainment and content development agency that develops alternate reality games. "Amazon SES gives us a simple way to send high-quality email directly from Amazon EC2 for in-game messaging. By providing feedback and insight into the quality of the email we're sending, we can further improve our communication with customers."

EyeJot is an easy-to-use video mail platform that can be used by both consumers and businesses to send video messages. "EyeJot is excited to be working with Amazon SES and we plan to use the new service for all our transactional email sending. Since email is an integral part of just about every business, including our own, it's nice to know there's a resource that product developers can employ that simplifies the task of sending email," said David Geller, CEO and Founder, EyeJot. "Amazon's well-documented API allows developers to send email without having to configure and manage SMTP servers. Amazon SES is easy to set up and use, and will enable us to more effectively deliver our video mail notification messages to our customers."