AWS Simple Email Service – SES

• SES is a fully managed service that provides an email platform with an easy, cost-effective way to send and receive email using your own email addresses and domains.
• can be used to send both transactional and promotional emails securely, and globally at scale.
• acts as an outbound email server and eliminates the need to support its own software or applications to do the heavy lifting of email transport.
• acts as an inbound email server to receive emails that can help develop software solutions such as email autoresponders, email unsubscribe systems, and applications that generate customer support tickets from incoming emails.
• existing email server can also be configured to send outgoing emails through SES with no change in any settings in the email clients
• Maximum message size including attachments is 10 MB per message (after base64 encoding).
• integrated with CloudWatch and CloudTrail

SES Characteristics

• Compatible with SMTP
• Applications can send email using a single API call in many supported languages Java, .Net, PHP, Perl, Ruby, HTTPS, etc
• Optimized for the highest levels of uptime, availability, and scales as per the demand
• Provides sandbox environment for testing
• provides Reputation dashboard, performance insights, anti-spam feedback
• provides statistics on email deliveries, bounces, feedback loop results, emails opened, etc.
• supports DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) and Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
• supports flexible deployment: shared, dedicated, and customer-owned IPs
• supports attachments with many popular content formats, including documents, images, audio, and video, and scans every attachment for viruses and malware.
• integrates with KMS to provide the ability to encrypt the mail that it writes to the S3 bucket.
• uses client-side encryption to encrypt the mail before it sends the email to  S3.

Sending Limits

• Production SES has a set of sending limits which include
  • Sending Quota – max number of emails in a 24-hour period
  • Maximum Send Rate – max number of emails per second
• SES automatically adjusts the limits upward as long as emails are of high quality and they are sent in a controlled manner, as any spike in the email sent might be considered to be spam.
• Limits can also be raised by submitting a Quota increase request

SES Best Practices

• Send high-quality and real production content that the recipients want
• Only send to those who have signed up for the mail
• Unsubscribe recipients who have not interacted with the business recently
• Have low bounce and compliant rates and remove bounced or complained addresses, using SNS to monitor bounces and complaints, treating them as an opt-out
• Monitor the sending activity

AWS Certification Exam Practice Questions

• Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
• AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
• AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
• Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.

1. What does Amazon SES stand for?
   1. Simple Elastic Server
   2. Simple Email Service
   3. Software Email Solution
   4. Software Enabled Server
2. Your startup wants to implement an order fulfillment process for selling a personalized gadget that needs an average of 3-4 days to produce with some orders taking up to 6 months you expect 10 orders per day on your first day. 1000 orders per day after 6 months and 10,000 orders after 12 months. Orders coming in are checked for consistency men dispatched to your manufacturing plant for production quality control packaging shipment and payment processing If the product does not meet the quality standards at any stage of the process employees may force the process to repeat a step Customers are notified via email about order status and any critical issues with their orders such as payment failure. Your case architecture includes AWS Elastic Beanstalk for your website with an RDS MySQL instance for customer data and orders. How can you implement the order fulfillment process while making sure that the emails are delivered reliably? [PROFESSIONAL]
   1. Add a business process management application to your Elastic Beanstalk app servers and re-use the ROS database for tracking order status use one of the Elastic Beanstalk instances to send emails to customers.
   2. Use SWF with an Auto Scaling group of activity workers and a decider instance in another Auto Scaling group with min/max=1 Use the decider instance to send emails to customers.
   3. Use SWF with an Auto Scaling group of activity workers and a decider instance in another Auto Scaling group with min/max=1 use SES to send emails to customers.
   4. Use an SQS queue to manage all process tasks Use an Auto Scaling group of EC2 Instances that poll the tasks and execute them. Use SES to send emails to customers.

References

• AWS_SES