I have an email-sending solution that's hosted on-premises or that's on an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance, and I want to migrate to Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES). How can I do that?
Resolution
To move from another email-sending solution to Amazon SES, follow these steps:
- Verify your domain with Amazon SES.
- Request production access.
- Configure domain authentication systems.
- Generate your SMTP credentials.
- 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 using Amazon SES, your 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 Moving out of the Amazon SES Sandbox.
Configure domain authentication systems
You can configure your Amazon SES domain to use authentication systems such as DKIM and SPF. This step is optional, but setting up DKIM, SPF, or both can improve the deliverability of your emails.
For instructions on setting up DKIM, see Authenticating email with DKIM in Amazon SES. For instructions on setting 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 regular 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, you must update the configuration for that application to refer to an Amazon 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 sending email using Amazon SES. You can also set up the following optional features:
- You can create configuration sets, which are sets of rules that are applied to the emails that you send. For example, you can use configuration sets to specify where notifications are sent when an email is delivered or when an email bounces. For more information, see Using configuration sets in Amazon SES.
- When you send email using Amazon SES, 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, or if you want to have full control over the reputations of your IP addresses, you can lease dedicated IP addresses for an additional monthly charge. For more information, see Dedicated IP addresses for Amazon SES.