Domain and Email Address Verification in Amazon SES

07/03/17 Update: You can now verify as many as 10,000 identities per AWS account. See this forum announcement for details.

As you may have read in Jeff Barr’s blog post on the main AWS Blog, Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) launched domain verification today. We wanted to dig deeper into the whys and whats of both email and domain verification in our service.

Why does Amazon SES require verification?

You’ve probably received phishing email from a spoofed email address at some point, right? We wanted to prevent people from sending that kind of email through Amazon SES. To prevent malicious senders from using spoofed email addresses, we require proof of ownership, or verification. This way, we can protect you by preventing people from spoofing your email address, which helps maintain the high sending reputation of Amazon SES.

What verification options are available?

Domain Verification

We just launched domain verification today, and we’re excited about the options that it gives our customers. With domain verification, you get the following benefits:

• You only have a one-time setup for an entire domain, and you have an even easier setup if you’re an Amazon Route 53 customer, because you can verify your domain with just a few clicks.
• You can easily integrate Amazon SES into existing systems without knowing all of the possible sending email addresses.
• You can easily send corporate email through Amazon SES, which will help customers who run their corporate infrastructure on EC2.

Email Address Verification

We haven’t disabled email address verification, however. To use domain verification, you need to have the ability to insert a TXT record into your domain’s DNS, and not everyone has that access. With email address verification, you get the following benefits:

• You don’t need to have access to your DNS records.
• You can still use labeling (which you can easily use with Variable Envelope Return Path (VERP)), in that once you verify example@example.com, you can send from example+anylabel@example.com and example@anylabel2@example.com.
• You can verify an email address almost immediately, instead of having to wait up to 72 hours for your domain verification to go through.

Whichever you choose, you can have up to 1000 verified email addresses and domains in your Amazon SES account.

If you want to learn more about domain verification, please join us at our webinar on June 12 at 10:00 AM Pacific Time. We will demonstrate how to use domain verification in Amazon SES as well as answer audience questions. Click here to reserve your seat today.

We hope that you enjoy our new feature, and we’d love to hear your feedback on both this feature and future features you might like to see from Amazon SES!