How do I migrate my email platform to Amazon SES?

Resolution

To move from another email platform to Amazon SES, complete the following steps:

1. Verify your domain with Amazon SES.
2. Request production access.
3. (Optional) Configure domain authentication systems.
4. Generate your SMTP credentials.
5. Connect to an SMTP endpoint.

Verify your domain with Amazon SES

Before you can use Amazon SES to send email, you must verify the identities that you plan to send email from. In Amazon SES, an identity can be an email address or an entire domain. When you verify a domain, you can use Amazon SES to send email from any address on that domain.

For more information, see Verifying a DKIM domain identity with your DNS provider.

Request production access

When you start to use Amazon SES, your Amazon SES account is in a sandbox environment. In the sandbox, you can send email only to addresses that you verified. Additionally, there are restrictions in the sandbox environment on the number of messages that you can send per day and per second. To use your Amazon SES account in production, you must move your account out of the sandbox environment.

For more information, see Request production access (Moving out of the Amazon SES sandbox).

(Optional) Configure domain authentication systems

You can configure your Amazon SES domain to use authentication systems such as DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) and Sender Policy Framework (SPF). This optional step can improve the deliverability of your emails.

To set up DKIM, see Authenticating email with DKIM in Amazon SES. To set up SPF, see Authenticating email with SPF in Amazon SES.

Generate your SMTP credentials

To send email with an application that uses SMTP, you must generate SMTP credentials. Your SMTP credentials are different than your AWS credentials. Additionally, SMTP credentials are unique to each AWS Region.

For more information, see Obtaining Amazon SES SMTP credentials.

Connect to an SMTP endpoint

If you use a message-transfer agent such as Postfix or Sendmail, then you must update the application configuration to refer to an SES SMTP endpoint. For a complete list of SMTP endpoints, see Connecting to an Amazon SES SMTP endpoint.

Note: The SMTP credentials that you created in the previous step are associated with a specific AWS Region. You must connect to the SMTP endpoint in the Region that you created the SMTP credentials in.

Additional features

After you connect to an SMTP endpoint, you can start to use Amazon SES to send emails. You can also set up the following optional features:

• You can create configuration sets, which are sets of rules applied to the emails that you send. For example, you can use configuration sets to specify where Amazon SES sends notifications when an email delivers or bounces. For more information, see Using configuration sets in Amazon SES.
• When you use Amazon SES to send email, it's important to monitor the bounces and complaints for your account. Amazon SES includes a reputation dashboard that you can use to track bounces and complaints. For more information, see Using reputation metrics to track bounce and complaint rates. You can also create Amazon CloudWatch alarms to alert you when bounce or complaint rates get too high. For more information, see Creating reputation monitoring alarms using CloudWatch.
• If you send a large volume of email, then you can lease dedicated IP addresses for an additional monthly charge. This gives you complete control over your sender reputation. For more information, see Dedicated IP addresses for Amazon SES.