New - SMTP Support for the Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)

We have added an SMTP interface to the Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) to make it even easier for you to send transactional or bulk email. We've had a lot of requests for this feature and I am confident that it will be really popular. There's a new SMTP item in the SES tab of the AWS Management Console:

This items leads to a page containing all of the information that you need to have in order to make use of SMTP with SES:

You no longer need to write any code to gain the efficiency and deliverability benefits of SES. Instead, you use the SES tab of the AWS Management Console to create an SMTP user and a set of credentials, and then you use those credentials to configure the email client of your choice:

This simple process also creates an IAM user with the appropriate permissions and policies. Credentials in hand, you can configure your mail client (Thunderbird, Outlook, and so forth) to use SMTP for mail delivery.

You will still need to verify the source ("from") addresses that you plan to use to send email, and you'll also need to request production access in order to increase your sending limits. You can initiate both of these tasks from the console:

The newest version of the SES Developer Guide includes a new section on the SMTP interface, with complete directions for configuring SMTP client apps, packaged software, application code (including a PHP + MySQL example), and server-side mail transfer agents (MTAs) including Sendmail, Postfix, and Exim.

-- Jeff;

Comments

[Pothi]

Wow! That's a great feature indeed. I still remember the days when SES was introduced and when one has to configure a number of things to make it work.

[Davide Moraschi]

A long awaited very gooooooooooooooooooooood new!
thanks folks.

Davide

[Michael Jensen]

I just whipped up a quick howto for setting up Postfix to use SES as an SMTP relay. Just in case anyone wants a relatively easy way to start using SES.
http://www.millcreeksys.com/2011/12/14/how-to-configure-your-postfix-server-to-relay-email-through-amazon-simple-email-service-ses/

[Neil Levine]

Great Postfix write-up Michael. Shame that AWS haven't opened up the SMTP service on port 587 to reduce the need for the stunnel config.

[Eric Hammond]

When requesting production access for SES, there are options like: marketing, subscription, transactional, system. However, there is no option for "personal" or "human".

Are we allowed to use SES if we are using an EC2 instance as the primary mail server for personal email? Having SMTP support makes this much easier.

[Jeff Barr]

@Eric - Yes, you can certainly send personal email through SES. You will, of course, need a non-AWS service to receive it.

[Stefan Guha]

Is it a deliberate decision to have SES reject messages containing a header "Importance:"?

Some of the Microsoft email clients use this, even if not indicating non-normal priority. It cannot be switched off to my knowledge.

Effectively, this hinders WLM client software to use SES/SMTP als mail delivery service.

Thanks

[Bernd Eckenfels]

The use of smtps instead of smtp/startls is a real PITA, I hope you reconsider, please. Use smtp or submission port. Too many MTAs dont natively support smtps (client side) to make this usefull.