Amazon smokes up email with bacn

Amazon Web Services has launched its Simple Email Services (SES), which promises application owners to overcome anti-spam and infrastructure hurdles through a multi-stage verification and sender-identification process.

To get around the spam problem, Amazon's SES has been based on a verification system that involves sending a confirmation email to a would-be subscriber. Once a recipient has clicked on the embedded link the recipient has been verified.

Email that a user has subscribed to

"At this point, with verified addresses in hand, you can send up to 200 messages per day, at a maximum rate of 1 message per second," AWS explained on its blog.

Once certain reputation hurdles were overcome, the service allowed application owners to send up to 1,000,000 emails a day.

An initial 200 email cap was in place to allow developers to test their application and the verification process, according to AWS, but importantly it also played a role in building one's reputation "as a sender of high quality email."

Once that initial process has been passed, a mass emailer would need to go through a 24 hour identification process via Amazon's SES Production Access Request Form, which, if passed, meant verifications would no longer be required.

"Once granted production access, you will no longer have to verify the destination addresses and you'll be able to send email to any address," AWS stated.

Reputations could grow quickly in the AWS trust ecosystem. Within three days, according to AWS, a daily quota could grow to 10,000 messages.

"Similarly, the maximum send rate will start out at one email per second, and can rise to 10 per second within 3 days, and all the way to 90 per second within a couple of weeks."

Those that require capacity to send more than one million messages a day (more than 90 a second) would need to arrange that capacity with Amazon directly.