Amazon SES

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is AWS's service for sending and receiving email at scale, for both transactional and marketing mail. It provides the delivery infrastructure and leaves most of the surrounding tooling to you.

You verify identities (domains or single addresses) in an AWS region, then send through the SES API, usually via an AWS SDK or the CLI with IAM credentials, or through the SMTP interface with separate SMTP credentials. Delivery events (sends, deliveries, bounces, complaints, opens, clicks, rejections) are published through "configuration sets" to other AWS services: CloudWatch, SNS, EventBridge or Data Firehose. To receive mail, you point your MX records at the regional inbound endpoint, and receipt rules decide what happens to each recipient's mail.

Useful for a small team already on AWS: an account-level suppression list; Virtual Deliverability Manager, which gives deliverability insights and recommendations; IP filters for inbound mail; and availability in many AWS regions, each spread across several availability zones. SES is on AWS's list of HIPAA-eligible services.

New accounts start in a sandbox in each region: only verified recipients, at most 200 messages per 24 hours and 1 per second, until AWS approves a production-access request. It isn't a mailbox: the inbound endpoints don't serve IMAP, so you can't read received mail in an email client.