I give up! Amazon SES is a pain in the tail to get running. I understand that security is a compromise between the desire to put something inside of a block of concrete and leaving it in the middle of the street. SES is too deeply embedded by Amazon’s paranoia. Poorly documented sandboxing, no obvious way out, and unreliable performance make it anything but simple.
I’ve tried on and off for a month to deal with it. I went back to SendGrid which is truly simple, reliable, and easy to use. From start to test email delivery from my EC2 instance took under 5 minutes.
Now, in all fairness, I have used Sendgrid before, and I use it at the company where I’m the IT Manager. It is bundled free with Azure hosting. However, Azure is like flying economy class whereas AWS is like flying jumpseat. You have alot more data and alot more control at AWS.
The majority of what I use it for is administrative notifications from my EC2 instance and the wordpress sites I host on it. It’s really a shame, because so much of AWS is well documented and otherwise easy enough to use. However, AWS support is $100/mo and there is no “break glass” option of $10/incident etc for individual developers who need help, but don’t want to subscribe to help.
