SES, Pinpoint, and Communication Services - Email, SMS, and Multi-Channel

What you will learn

• Amazon SES — transactional email at scale and how it differs from SNS email
• SES key concepts — verified identities, sending limits, and bounce handling
• Amazon Pinpoint — multi-channel customer engagement platform
• Pinpoint vs SES vs SNS — which to use for which communication pattern
• Setting up SES for a production application
• Pinpoint campaigns, journeys, and analytics
• Moving out of the SES sandbox for production sending
• Best practices to protect email sender reputation

Why this matters

At Swiggy, every order confirmation, delivery notification, and invoice is an email triggered by a backend service. That is millions of emails per day — each one transactional, triggered by a specific user action, personalised, and time-sensitive. SES handles this at $0.10 per thousand emails — fractions of a penny per email. At Hotstar, marketing wants to send personalised re-engagement campaigns to users who have not watched in 30 days — segmented by what they watched last, their subscription tier, and their preferred language. Pinpoint handles the segmentation, campaign scheduling, A/B testing, and analytics. Two different problems — transactional vs marketing — two different services.

Amazon SES — Simple Email Service

SES is AWS's email sending service. It handles the infrastructure behind sending email at scale — delivery, reputation management, bounce processing, and spam compliance — so your application just calls an API and the email goes out.

Two use patterns:

SES handles both, but for large-scale marketing campaigns Pinpoint is the better tool.

SES vs SNS for email:

This is a common confusion. SNS has an email subscription type but it is basic — plain text, not formatted, no analytics, no bounce handling.

SES Key Concepts

Verified Identities:

Before sending, you must verify that you own the domain or email address you are sending from.

The SES Sandbox — new account restriction:

New AWS accounts start in the SES sandbox:

Remember

If your application sends emails in production but users are not receiving them, check whether your SES account is still in the sandbox. Sandbox emails only reach verified addresses — any unverified recipient gets silently dropped.

Sending Limits:

Both start low and increase automatically as you build a good sending reputation. You can also request increases.

Reputation Management — Bounces and Complaints:

Email reputation determines whether your emails land in inbox or spam. Two metrics matter:

SES automatically handles bounces by sending bounce notifications to your application via SNS or SQS. Your application must process these and remove bad addresses from its lists.

Configuration Sets:

A configuration set groups sending settings and enables tracking.

Use configuration sets for every production email — you need the bounce and complaint data.

Sending Email with SES

Through the console (testing):

Through the AWS CLI:

Through SDK in your application (Python example):

Amazon Pinpoint — Multi-Channel Customer Engagement

Pinpoint is the marketing and customer engagement platform. Where SES sends an email when your code tells it to, Pinpoint manages who to contact, when, through which channel, with what message — automatically.

Channels Pinpoint supports:

Key Pinpoint concepts:

Segments:

Groups of users defined by attributes. Pinpoint segments users from your data.

Campaigns:

One-time or recurring messages sent to a segment.

Journeys:

Multi-step automated workflows triggered by user actions.

Analytics:

Pinpoint tracks everything automatically:

• Email: delivered, opened, clicked, bounced, unsubscribed
• SMS: delivered, failed
• Push: received, opened
• Campaign: conversion rate, revenue attributed

Pinpoint vs SES vs SNS:

Remember

SES is the API your developers call to send a specific email to a specific person. Pinpoint is the platform your marketing team uses to define who gets what message when. They solve different problems. Use both — SES for transactional, Pinpoint for marketing.

Hands-on Lab — Verify SES Identity and Send Test Email

Step 1 — Verify an email identity

Step 2 — Check sandbox status

Step 3 — Send a test email

Step 4 — Create a Configuration Set

Step 5 — Request production access (do this when ready for real users)

Step 6 — Explore Pinpoint

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Common Mistake

Staying in the SES sandbox and deploying to production. SES sandbox emails only reach verified addresses. If your production users are not verified in SES, they never receive your emails. No error is thrown — emails are accepted by SES and silently not delivered. Request production access before going live.

Common Mistake

Not processing SES bounce notifications. If your application keeps sending to bounced email addresses, your bounce rate climbs above 5% and email providers start treating your domain as a spammer. Set up an SNS topic for bounce notifications, subscribe a Lambda to it, and have Lambda remove bounced addresses from your sending list immediately.

Common Mistake

Using SNS email for transactional emails your users will read. SNS email is plain text, has no formatting, no tracking, and requires subscribers to opt in via a confirmation email. It is designed for internal alerting — not for customer-facing emails. Use SES for any email a customer will receive.

Tip

Set up DKIM, SPF, and DMARC for your domain in SES. These DNS records tell email providers that you are authorised to send from your domain. Without them, your emails are more likely to land in spam. SES provides these records when you verify a domain — add them to your DNS immediately. Good email deliverability starts with proper domain authentication.