SES General Questions - Price, Spam, Speed

Hello Ines,

1, When do you have to pay for the service? Also if there are hard/soft bounces, out-of-office messages?

There is a cost after you consume your free tier usage,. If you call Amazon SES from an Amazon EC2 instance or through Elastic Beanstalk, you can send up to 62,000 email messages per month at no charge. There are hard/soft bounces and the customer is expected to monitor and act upon those to avoid being limited or eventually forbidden to use SES,.

2, How can Spam be avoided? Is AWS handling this automatically?

Here is the FAQ from SES:

Amazon SES uses a number of spam and virus protection measures. It uses block lists to prevent mail from known spammers from entering the system in the first place. It also performs virus scans on every incoming email that contains an attachment.

Amazon SES makes its spam detection verdicts available to you, enabling you to decide if you trust each message. In addition to the spam and virus verdicts, Amazon SES provides the DKIM and SPF check results.

What prevents Amazon SES users from sending spam?

Amazon SES uses in-house content filtering technologies to scan email content for spam and malware.

In exceptional cases, accounts identified as sending spam or other low-quality email may be suspended, or AWS may take such other action as it deems appropriate. When malware is detected, Amazon SES prevents these emails from being sent."

3, With what kind of speed will the messages be sent out? Is there less speed for mass messages? (up to 100.000)

Yes.

Your Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) account has a set of sending limits to regulate the number of email messages that you can send and the rate at which you can send them. Sending limits benefit all Amazon SES customers because they help to maintain the trusted relationship between Amazon SES and internet service providers (ISPs). Sending limits help you to gradually ramp up your sending activity and decrease the likelihood that ISPs will block your emails because of sudden, unexpected spikes in your email sending volume or rate.

SES pricing: https://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/

SES handling bounces and complaints: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/ses/handling-bounces-and-complaints/

Deliverability and SES: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/deliverability-and-ses.html

SES FAQ. https://aws.amazon.com/ses/faqs/

Managing Your Amazon SES Sending Limits: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/manage-sending-limits.html