What is the difference between sendmail and Amazon SES on Ec2

Question

I am confused with sending emails on Ec2. i want to know why would we need SES if we can send emails using sendmail like we normally use in VPS servers.

Whats the benefit of that. Am i missing something

Answer 1

There isn't much difference if you are sending only few emails. But if you are sending many emails daily like user notifications, promotion etc then amazon doesn't like then being send from EC2.

Bulk emailing might get ec2 ip ranges blacklisted I guess, so when you send bulk emails from EC2, AWS will issue a notice. I have seen that when I had some configuration issue with my script and send a few hundred email in a very short period.

Amazon provides a way to remove these limitation on EC2 by submitting a request through the link given below

https://portal.aws.amazon.com/gp/aws/html-forms-controller/contactus/ec2-email-limit-rdns-request

You might have to setup elasticips for the EC2 instances, DKIM signing mechanism, SPF record, antispam, TLS etc.

Sending email using AWS SES apis are very easy (atleast from my point of view) compared to the above config and if you are a EC2 user then SES is available free of charge.