SES

Introduction

Amazon SES stands for "Simple Email Service". As the name implies, this is an email service. Typically when a customer wants an application with authentication, there will be at least 1 feature that has to send an email. For example to reset the password.

Setting up an email server and configuring it in such a way that the emails get send correctly (is actually delivered and did not end up in someone's spam folder) is not easy and often requires lots of work. It is much easier and reliable to use the email service of a big provider and SES is one of them.

How to use SES

The service is available using SMTP or by using the AWS SDK. However at the time of writing the service is not available in all regions, but only in regions:

• US East (N. Virginia)
• US West (Oregon)
• EU (Ireland)

Of course for the receiving party it is not very important where the mail server is located, but as you can imagine it might be different for the application. If the server is setup in region Singapore and the mail server is located in Ireland it is possible that there will be connectivity problems at some point. When the application cannot connect to the mail server, no mails will be send.

Laravel can use the AWS SDK almost out of the box and it is the recommended way to use SES with Laravel. More information on that can be found here: https://laravel.com/docs/5.6/mail#driver-prerequisites.

Pricing

In most cases using SES will be free (<62.000 emails a month). But just be sure, always check the pricing page:

https://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/.