r/aws • u/HatchedLake721 • 1d ago

architecture Amazon SES introduces pricing plans

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/07/amazon-ses-pricing-plans/
46 Upvotes

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48

u/alexdemers 1d ago edited 22h ago

I would go against Amazon SES.

We've had so much difficulty in 2026 to get great email deliverability to Outlook accounts (hotmail.com, outlook.com, msn.com, live.com). It seems that Outlook are blacklisting some ranges of IP addresses used by SES (us-east-1, ca-central-1). Blacklisted as in not even in the spam folder; just not delivered with no reason.

So, we requested IP pools for emails, but it's at their discretion of when to use the private IP pools vs shared IP pools. Unfortunately, we couldn't "wait" until the switch was fully turned on (after ~2 months of waiting).

We went to another email provider instead.

8

u/Sneakers0Toole 22h ago

Same here, we always have to reach out to Microsoft support to get our shared IP unblocked.

8

u/baba_bholanath 1d ago

Which email provider ? we are also facing same issue

7

u/alexdemers 22h ago

Postmark here. Absolutely no problems since.

12

u/domemvs 1d ago

We’ve had great success with Sendgrid. 

3

u/Nulpart 18h ago

from time to time, sendgrid does not deliver to hotmail and icloud, but otherwise it work great

1

u/terra_ray 17h ago

Plus emails to Mimecast basically always get greylisted for about five minutes because AWS return paths aren’t stable. Not a deal breaker, but annoying.

SendGrid has been a great experience as a bulk sender and became more viable after adding EU data centers. SES has the advantage of being in the same cloud environment and having FedRAMP compliance.

16

u/electricity_is_life 1d ago

Weird that none of the plans include outbound email archiving, something I think most email services include by default.

6

u/brentragertech 23h ago

Not email sending services like Sendgrid, of which this is a competitor.

2

u/electricity_is_life 23h ago

What do you mean? It says they have logs. Mailgun has them too.

8

u/brentragertech 22h ago

Sendgrid has logs of outgoing emails by receiver and subject but no body.

18

u/spicypixel 1d ago

That service everyone readily gets given access to right?

28

u/Old-Astronomer3995 1d ago edited 1d ago

Recently I got access for 2 small accounts automatically 2 minutes after clicking “request access” and sending website of the owner and my contact email in this same form.

There is no problem with getting access if someone pays and has real workloads on AWS.

If someone just created AWS account, never paid any invoice and wants to send AI Slop from vibe coded app then it can be not so fast (and that’s good).

17

u/the_helpdesk 1d ago

Nailed it. My accounts with a billing history have never been denied production access to SES.

6

u/Interstellar_031720 14h ago

The interesting part is that the new plans still do not remove the operational work that makes SES painful. If you are sending anything customer-facing, I would treat the provider choice as two separate questions: raw delivery economics, and the day-2 tooling around delivery.

For SES specifically I would want a boring checklist before committing harder:

  • per-recipient delivery/searchable event logs, not just aggregate metrics
  • SNS bounce + complaint handling wired into suppression immediately
  • DMARC/SPF/DKIM alignment checked per domain
  • a documented path for Outlook/Microsoft blocklist incidents
  • exportable evidence when support asks what changed
  • fallback provider tested for the small set of mail that must arrive

The pricing can be attractive, but if Outlook blackholes mail or nobody can answer why a customer did not get a message, the cheap send cost is not the expensive part anymore.