How do I set up and connect to SMTP using Amazon SES?

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I want to set up Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) for Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES). How do I set up and connect to SMTP using Amazon SES?

Resolution

Follow these steps to set up SMTP with Amazon SES and then connect to the Amazon SES SMTP endpoint to send email:

1.    Open the Amazon SES console.

2.    From the navigation pane, choose Account dashboard.

3.    Under Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) settings, note the values for SMTP endpoints and Ports. Use the SMTP endpoint and ports to connect to SMTP. For example, if you're in the eu-west-1 AWS Region, note the following:

SMTP endpoint: email-smtp.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com
Port: 25, 465 or 587

4.    Choose Create My SMTP Credentials. Then, proceed with the steps to generate your SMTP credentials.

5.    Select the Amazon SES SMTP port that you'll send email from based on the connection method that you want to use (STARTTLS or TLS Wrapper).

Important: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) restricts outbound traffic on port 25 for all EC2 instances by default. If you must use SMTP port 25, you can request to remove this restriction. Or, you can select a different port to send email.

6.    Connect to the Amazon SES SMTP endpoint to test the connection over the port that you want to send email from. For example, you can run the telnet command:

$ telnet email-smtp.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com 465
Connected to email-smtp.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com.

7.    After you confirm that the connection to the port is successful, you can start using your operating system's command line to start sending email using the Amazon SES SMTP interface.