Amazon launches Simple Email Service

Amazon have launched a new product as part of its AWS (Amazon Web Services) product range, named Simple Email Service. Built on its existing internal tools used to send millions of e-mails to Amazon customers, the service aims to make it extremely simple for anybody wishing to send out a large volume of e-mail.

It also features an extremely attractive price point: you can use the service for nothing if you send less than 2000 e-mails per day and access it from EC2 (Amazon’s cloud computing service) or Amazon Elastic Beanstalk (AWS’ automated deployment manager) – you just pay for bandwidth. Beyond that, it’s only $0.10 USD (ten cents) per thousand e-mails (unique recipients).

The pricing and other features of SES will concern other big players in the market. While MailChimp, a widely used company already well-established in the market, will probably survive justifying its $10 per thousand e-mails with the more advanced and user-friendly features it offers. But smaller players such as SendGrid and PostMark may struggle even with prices around the $1.50 per thousand e-mails.

It is widely known that all of Amazon’s EC2 IP addresses are blacklisted by most major mail providers; the ease of access to EC2 and the ability to install a mail sender made it a haven for spammers. “Deliverability” is a key metric when analysing bulk mail providers: clients will always demand that close to 99.9% of e-mails they send are received and don’t end up in Spam folders. Amazon says it has mitigated the chance of this happening by putting in place analytics to quickly identify spammers on the platform and to evaluate how ISPs react to the incoming e-mail, and has vowed to work closely with those responsible for managing spam e-mails to ensure that as many of their genuine e-mails are received. They have also stated that SES runs on a new IP address block, separate from EC2.

More on SES on the Amazon AWS site.

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