Amazon SES can send thousands of emails for just a few dollars. If your email marketing bill keeps climbing as your subscriber list grows, it's worth a look.
The catch is that sending an email and running a newsletter are two different jobs. SES handles delivery, but someone still needs to manage signups, unsubscribes, failed deliveries, campaign scheduling, and reporting. You can build that yourself, but you're also signing up to test it, fix it, and keep it running.
What Amazon SES actually gives you
SES does more than accept SMTP requests. You can send through its API or SMTP interface, verify your domain, enable DKIM signing, and receive delivery, bounce, and complaint events. With event tracking configured, you can also collect opens and clicks.
AWS provides account-level suppression lists and some built-in contact list and unsubscribe features, too. So you're not starting from scratch.
What you don't get is a complete newsletter workspace. There's no all-in-one experience for designing a campaign, organizing and segmenting subscribers, scheduling a send, and reviewing the results. You need to build that layer or connect another product to SES.
SES pricing depends on the plan and services you use. Check AWS's current pricing for your region and setup, including any additional services you might need.
What running a newsletter involves
Keeping your subscriber list accurate
A CSV full of email addresses isn't enough. You need to know who is subscribed, who opted out, and which addresses should never receive another campaign.
You should also keep a record of where subscribers came from and, where required, how they gave consent. Double opt-in is often a sensible choice because it confirms that someone controls the address they entered. It also catches typos and unwanted signups. It isn't mandatory in every situation.
One of the easiest mistakes to make is importing an old list and accidentally emailing people who already unsubscribed. Your system needs to prevent that.
Making unsubscribes work reliably
Putting an unsubscribe link in the footer is only part of the job. Depending on your sending volume and the messages you send, Gmail and Yahoo also require one-click unsubscribe support. That involves headers such as List-Unsubscribe and List-Unsubscribe-Post.
Behind the scenes, the request has to reach the right subscriber record, update their status, and keep them out of future sends. That last part matters even when someone unsubscribes while a campaign is already in progress.
Handling bounces and spam complaints
SES can report when an address doesn't exist or a recipient marks your message as spam. You can route those events through Amazon SNS, for example.
But receiving the event doesn't solve the problem. Your application has to process it, update the contact, and stop sending where appropriate. It also needs to distinguish temporary delivery failures from permanent bounces.
Getting this wrong can hurt your sender reputation. We cover that in more detail in our Amazon SES deliverability guide.
Setting up domain authentication
Before you start sending, configure DKIM, SPF, and DMARC for your domain. SES helps with part of the setup, but you'll still need to add or update DNS records.
A custom MAIL FROM domain can help with SPF alignment. It isn't always required for DMARC to pass, since aligned DKIM can satisfy DMARC on its own. And even when authentication is configured correctly, there's no guarantee your email will land in the inbox.
Building emails that work in actual inboxes
A newsletter needs to look right in Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, and on phones. That sounds straightforward until a layout that looked fine in your browser breaks in an email client.
Whether you write the HTML yourself, start from templates, or use a visual editor, you'll need to handle images, links, personalization, plain-text versions, and testing before each send.
Sending a campaign without losing track of it
Say you have 50,000 subscribers. You can't just fire off 50,000 API requests and assume everything will work out.
Your sending process has to stay within your SES quotas, retry recoverable failures, avoid duplicate messages, respect suppression rules, and support scheduled campaigns. It also needs to catch opt-outs that happen after the send begins.
Most of this is invisible when things go well. It becomes very visible when a campaign stops halfway through and you need to work out who received it.
Turning SES events into useful reports
SES can generate events for deliveries, opens, clicks, bounces, and complaints. To get a useful campaign report, you still need to collect those events, match them to the right emails, and present the results.
Open rates also need a little caution. Some email clients preload images for privacy reasons, so an open doesn't necessarily mean someone read your newsletter.
Should you build your own newsletter platform or use Mailomia?
Building your own system gives you control over the features, but it's a substantial project. Integrating the SES API is only one piece. You still need the interface, subscriber management, campaign logic, testing, error handling, and ongoing maintenance. Email provider requirements change, too. Even with experienced developers, this takes real time away from your main product.
Mailomia lets you run newsletters through your own Amazon SES account without building that platform yourself. It includes a visual editor, subscriber lists, signup forms, unsubscribe handling, and campaign reports. Your emails still go through your SES account, and AWS bills you for sending them.
Mailomia is free for up to 5,000 emails per month. Above that, it's $19/month, with AWS sending charges billed separately.
The bottom line
Amazon SES is a cost-effective way to send newsletters, but it isn't a complete email marketing platform by itself.
If you're thinking about building the missing pieces, account for the work that doesn't show up in a quick demo: consent records, unsubscribes, suppression lists, retries, and reliable reporting. Those are the things that become difficult to ignore once your list starts growing.
