Amazon SES – Not Meant for Individual Consumption

A client of ours was trying to send a ton of emails to clients for important updates. The emails where all true subscribed users, however the methodology of using Outlook provided us with a few “challenges”.

Firstly, most email accounts on ISP’s (Fios/Comcast/Cox etc) all have standard caps as to how many messages you can send at a time (see Here). Our service has a max of 500 emails an hour, which our client was trying to do in a minute.

We had migrated another mass messaging system to use Amazon SES with great success. They had a commercial software product that integrated perfectly with Amazon SES and allowed us to adjust send rates/etc. Since this met the needs of the commercial software product, we thought it would work well with Outlook as well.

This would work perfectly for a few messages, but when we tried to send out bulk messages we were stopped with a “454 Throttling failure: Maximum sending rate exceeded”. Apparently, Amazon SES does not handle large amounts of BCC addresses cleaning and counts them against your set SES sending rate.

Given this, it appears Amazon SES is only suited for use in custom applications and/or relayed mail message services where you can control the flow of single mail messages per second. We really had wished they had stated this somewhere on their SES Dashboard/help screen.

In anycase, Outlook really is not the best tool for managing sending mass emails, so we have since moved on to PHPList (Here.