Amazon Web Services Expand into Simple Email Service

Amazon announced, on January 25, 2011, that a simple email system is to be launched. Amazon is targeting developers and businesses who utilize a bulk email system to send huge quantities of messages to promote goods or services. Amazon’s bulk email system includes simplicity at its finest, eliminating having to build a messaging platform. Building this platform includes licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service. In addition, SES integrates with other Amazon web services so it will be easy to use those applications to send emails. With this new service there will be no long term commitment, no minimum amount a business needs to spend, and if fewer than 2,000 emails per day are sent from Amazon EC2 or AWS Elastic Beanstalk, no payment is required.

Amazon SES helps to dissipate challenges that building the big scale email platforms present. These include items such as emails that are delivered successfully, configuring the network, managing the server, and attaining Internet Service Provider (ISP) standards regarding email content. Up front costs are required by many third party email solutions, as are price negotiations and contracts. Amazon offers an API call and the business can access the email infrastructure to communicate to their customers in a cost-effective manner. SES uses technologies that filter content to scan the business’s outgoing email messages to determine that the content is meeting the ISP standards. The emails then are returned to the sender for correction or queued.

Pricing for SES is $.10 per thousand email messages sent, comparable to about $.35 elsewhere. If the email messages come from Amazon EC2 or AWS Elastic Beanstalk, the first two thousand are free. FREE. Suspicion has already arisen that this low pricing will be attracting spammers. Email deliverability has become more difficult as spam volumes have increased, encouraging ISPs to step up their efforts in protecting users.

Amazon has been a leader in the web-platform industry, making new technologies much more familiar to a larger amount of people. SES seeks to send high-quality email and improve the communication with customers. After all, customers have been asking for this ability from Amazon EC2.