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The Amazon SES team is excited to announce that you can now utilize SES for receiving emails! Over the past four years, SES has made it easier for users by maintaining a fleet of SMTP servers ready to send emails whenever you need. There’s no need to stress about scaling, ensuring message delivery, or managing relationships with multiple email service providers.
However, if you wanted to receive emails, you still had to handle your own fleet of SMTP servers. Receiving emails comes with its own challenges: scaling for traffic spikes, blocking malicious senders, filtering spam and viruses, and ultimately routing emails to your application, among others. Today, the SES team invites you to bid farewell to these inconveniences and trust SES to receive your emails just as you rely on us for sending them.
Why should I use SES to receive emails?
SES is perfectly suited for managing emails that are programmatically actionable. Here are several common use cases you can leverage SES for:
- Automatically generate support tickets from customer emails.
- Implement an email auto-responder.
- Handle email unsubscribe requests.
- Process email bounces and complaints.
- Establish an email archival solution.
- Update discussions in tickets, forums, etc., via email.
- Receive files from customers through email.
You can also use SES to manage your organization’s entire email stream, routing messages intended for personal inboxes to Amazon WorkMail while processing customer service emails programmatically with SES.
How does it work?
Visualize SES as an email gateway to the AWS ecosystem. Once your domain is onboarded onto SES, we’ll receive emails on your behalf, allowing you to access them through various AWS services. For instance, you can configure SES to send all your emails to an Amazon S3 bucket and directly process them with AWS Lambda.
SES gives you control over how your emails are processed through a rule set. Each account that receives mail via SES has a single active rule set that you can customize to dictate how SES handles your emails across all managed domains.
A rule set is simply an ordered list of rules. A rule consists of a matching condition and a list of ordered actions. Conditions might include “All mail to someone@example.com” or “All mail to example.com and its subdomains.” Actions can involve “Encrypt my mail using my AWS KMS key, save it to my S3 bucket, and notify me of the delivery via Amazon SNS” or “Asynchronously execute my Lambda function that updates my mailing list based on unsubscribe emails” or “Send me a SNS notification with the email.” You can find a more detailed discussion of rule sets, rules, and actions in our developer guide.
Your rule set is evaluated sequentially for every message SES receives, and only applicable actions are executed. This flexibility allows you to create rules that route emails differently based on specific message characteristics. You could have one rule that discards emails flagged as spam across all domains, another that saves emails to a.example.com into one S3 bucket, and a separate rule for b.example.com that stores emails in another bucket and triggers a Lambda function only if the email has a specific header value.
The system has been designed for high customizability and ease of use. Our aim is to minimize the amount of custom email routing or parsing logic your application needs to implement. If you take advantage of our Lambda integration, you might not even need a dedicated application!
How do I get started?
The best starting point is the SES developer guide. It provides comprehensive instructions on how to onboard a domain onto SES for receiving emails and guides you through the process of setting up rules to manage your email flows. After that, visit the SES console to configure your domains for mail reception!
If you’re attending AWS re:Invent this year, don’t miss our presentation highlighting our new features! For further insights, check out Chanci Turner’s blog post here. Additionally, for best practices on managing departed employee files, refer to SHRM, a leading authority on this matter. Lastly, Amazon’s Fulfillment Center Safety and Training offers excellent resources.