AWS Password Setup
Accessing SMTP server

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is the service provided by AWS. This service can be used as SMTP server in our code to send emails. As part of free usage tier Amazon allows you to send more than 60000 mails at free of cost from Amazon EC2 instance.

  1. Log into AWS management console. Then select "Amazon SES" service.
  2. In SES service, go to "Identity Management" sub menu > select "Email Addresses" menu item.
  3. In the email addresses page, click "Verify a New Mail address" button.
  4. Once you give a valid email address in pop-up box, submit the form using "Verify this Email Address" button.
  5. Once "Verify this Email Address" button is clicked, a verification mail will be sent to your email address with a link for verification. You must verify your email address using the verification link embedded in the mail.
  6. Once you verify your email address, your email address will be listed with verified status.
  7. Note that any email address used as a "from" email address and "sender" email address must be verified.
Generating user credentials
  1. Sign In to the AWS Management console and open the Amazon SES console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ses/
  2. In the navigation pane, choose SMTP Settings
  3. In the content pane, choose My SMTP Credentials
  4. For Create User for SMTP, type a name for your smtp user. Alternatively, you can use the default value that is provided in the this field. When you finish, choose Create.
  5. Choose Show User SMTP Credentials. Your SMTP credentials are shown on the screen. Copy these credentials and store them in a safe place. You can also choose Download Credentials to download a file that contains your credentials.
  6. Source: Amazon SES Developer Guide
Points to consider
  1. There are a few other points we need to be aware of. Amazon SES creates an email message in align with Internet Message Format specification (RFC 5322) specification. By default, Amazon SES restricts all new accounts to operate within the Amazon sandbox environment to prevent fraud and abuse. A user can send a maximum of 200 messages per 24 hours and only one message per second. It also ensures that all receivers and sender email addresses are verified.
  2. We can seek help from AWS customer care to move our account out of the sandbox, so that maximum limits can be extended. Moreover, moving out of the sandbox also enables us to send mail without verifying receivers. But we need to still verify sender’s email addresses.