How to use managed dedicated IPs for email sending

Starting to use dedicated IPs has always been a long, complicated process driven by factors such as the large effort to monitor and maintain the IPs and the costs, both in infrastructure and management of IP and Domain reputation. The Dedicated IP (Managed) feature in Amazon SES eliminates much of the complexity of sending email via dedicated IPs and allows you to start sending through dedicated IPs much faster and with less management overhead.

What’s the Difference Between standard dedicated IPs and managed dedicated IPs?

You can use SES for dedicated IP addresses in two ways: standard and managed. Both allow you to lease dedicated IP addresses for an additional fee, but differ in how they’re configured and managed. While there are shared commonalities they each have unique advantages dependent on your use case, see here for a comparison.

Standard dedicated IPs are manually set up and managed in SES. They allow you full control over your sending reputation but require you to fully manage your dedicated IPs, including warming them up, scaling them out, and managing your pools.

Managed dedicated IPs are a quick, and easy, way to start using dedicated IP addresses. These dedicated IP addresses leverage machine learning to remove the need to manage the IP warm-up process. The feature also handles the scaling of your IPs up or down as your volume increases (or decreases) to provide a quick, easy, and cost-efficient way to start using dedicated IP addresses that are managed by SES.

How Does the Managed Dedicated IP Feature Automate IP Warming?

Great deliverability through your dedicated IP address requires that you have a good reputation with the receiving ISPs, also known as a mailbox provider. Mailbox providers will only accept a small volume of email from an IP that they don’t recognize. When you’re first allocated an IP, it’s new and won’t be recognized by the receiving mailbox provider because it doesn’t have any reputation associated with it. In order for an IP’s reputation to be established, it must gradually build trust with receiving mailbox providers—this gradual trust building process is referred to as warming-up. Adding to the complexity is that each mailbox provider has their own concept of warming, accepting varying volumes of email as you work through the warm up process.

The concept of IP warming has always been a misnomer, with customers thinking that once their IP is “warm” that it stays that way when in reality the process is an ongoing one, fluctuating as your recipient domain mix changes and your volume changes. Ensuring that you have the best deliverability when sending via dedicated IPs requires monitoring more than just recipient engagement rates (opens, clicks, bounces, complaints, opt-ins, etc.), you also need to manage volume per mailbox provider. Understanding the volumes that recipient mailbox providers will accept is very difficult if not impossible for senders using standard Dedicated IPs. Managing this aspect of the warm up creates risk for sending too little, meaning warm-up takes longer, or too much, which means receiving mailbox providers may throttle, reduce IP reputation, or even filter out email being sent by an IP that is not properly warming up.

This process is a costly, risky, and time consuming one that can be eliminated using the managed feature. Managed dedicated IPs will automatically apportion the right amount of traffic per mailbox provider to your dedicated IPs and any leftover email volume is sent over the shared network of IPs, allowing you to send as you normally would. As time goes on, the proportion of email traffic being sent over your dedicated IPs increases until they are warm, at which point all of your emails will be sent through your dedicated IPs. In later stages, any sending that is in excess of your normal patterns is proactively queued to ensure the best deliverability to each mailbox provider.

As an example, if you’ve been sending all your traffic to Gmail, the IP addresses are considered warmed up only for Gmail and cold for other mailbox providers. If your customer domain mix changes and includes a large proportion of email sends to Hotmail, SES ramps up traffic slowly for Hotmail as the IP addresses are not warmed up yet while continuing to deliver all the traffic to Gmail via your dedicated IPs. The warmup adjustment is adaptive and is based on your actual sending patterns.

The managed feature is great for those that prioritize and want to be in complete control of their reputation while not wanting to spend the time and effort to manage the warm-up process or the scaling of IPs as your volume grows. A full breakdown of the use cases that are a good fit for the managed feature can be found here

How to Configure Managed Pools and Configuration Sets

Enabling managed dedicated IPs can be configured in just a few steps and can be done either from the console or programmatically. The first step is to create a managed IP pool, then the managed dedicated IPs feature will determine how many dedicated IPs you require based on your sending patterns, provision them for you, and then manage how they scale based on your sending requirements. Note that this process is not instantaneous, dependent on your sending patterns it may take more or less time for the dedicated IPs to be provisioned, you need to have consistent email volume coming from your account in order for the feature to provision the correct number of IPs.

Once enabled, you can utilize managed dedicated IPs in your email sending by associating the managed IP pool with a configuration set, and then specifying that configuration set when sending email. The configuration set can also be applied to a sending identity by using a default configuration set, which can simplify your sending, as anytime the associated sending identity is used to send email your managed dedicated IPs will be used.

Instructions

Configure Via The Console

To enable Dedicated IPs (Managed) via the Amazon SES console:

• Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the Amazon SES console at https://console.thinkwithwp.com/ses/.
• In the left navigation pane, choose Dedicated IPs.
• Do one of the following (Note: You will begin to incur charges after creating a Dedicated IPs (Managed) pool below)
  • If you don’t have existing dedicated IPs in your account:
    • The Dedicated IPs onboarding page is displayed. In the Dedicated IPs (Managed) overview panel, choose Enable dedicated IPs. The Create IP Pool page opens.
  • If you have existing dedicated IPs in your account:
    • Select the Managed IP pools tab on the Dedicated IPs page.
    • In the All Dedicated IP (managed) pools panel, choose Create Managed IP pool. The Create IP Pool page opens.
• In the Pool details panel,
  • Choose Managed (auto managed) in the Scaling mode field.
  • Enter a name for your managed pool in the IP pool name field.
  • Note
    • The IP pool name must be unique. It can’t be a duplicate of a standard dedicated IP pool name in your account.
    • You can have a mix of up to 50 pools split between both Standard and Dedicated IPs (Managed) per AWS Region in your account.
• (Optional) You can associate this managed IP pool with a configuration set by choosing one from the dropdown list in the Configuration sets field.
  • Note
    • If you choose a configuration set that’s already associated with an IP pool, it will become associated with this managed pool, and no longer be associated with the previous pool.
    • To add or remove associated configuration sets after this managed pool is created, edit the configuration set’s Sending IP pool parameter in the General details panel.
    • If you haven’t created any configuration sets yet, see Using configuration sets in Amazon SES.
• (Optional) You can add one or more Tags to your IP pool by including a tag key and an optional value for the key.
  • Choose Add new tag and enter the Key. You can also add an optional Value for the tag. You can add up to 50 tags, if you make a mistake, choose Remove.
  • To add the tags, choose Save changes. After you create the pool, you can add, remove, or edit tags by selecting the managed pool and choosing Edit.
• Select Create pool.
  • Note
    • After you create a managed IP pool, it can’t be converted to a standard IP pool.
    • When using Dedicated IPs (Managed), you can’t have more than 10,000 sending identities (domains and email addresses, in any combination) per AWS Region in your account.
• After you create your managed IP pool, a link will automatically be generated in the CloudWatch metrics column in the All Dedicated IPs (Managed) pools table in the SES console, that when selected, will open the Amazon CloudWatch console and display your sending reputation at an effective daily rate with specific mailbox providers for the managed pool using the following metrics:

You can also track the managed pool’s sending performance by using event publishing.

Configure VIA The API

You can configure your Managed Dedicated IP Pool through the API as well. A dedicated pool can be specified to be managed by setting the scaling-mode to “MANAGED” when creating the dedicated pool.

• Create a Dedicated Managed Pool with the CreateDedicatedIpPool action
  • Specify “ScalingMode” as “Managed”
• Create a configuration set that that will send through the dedicated pool with the CreateConfigurationSet action
  • Specify the name of the Pool you created in step 1
• Optional: Specify the Configuration as the default for a Sending Identity https://docs.thinkwithwp.com/ses/latest/APIReference-V2/API_PutEmailIdentityConfigurationSetAttributes.html
• Dependent on whether you completed step 3 do one of the following to send email either via SMTP or API
  • Send via a Configuration Set
    • Specify the Configuration Set in your SendEmail call
  • Send via a Sending Identity
    • Specify your FromEmailAddress with your SendEmail call

Configure Via The CLI

You can configure your SES resources through the CLI. A dedicated pool can be specified to be managed by setting the —scaling-mode MANAGED parameter when creating the dedicated pool.

• # Specify which AWS region to use
  • export AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=’us-east-1′
• # Create a managed dedicated pool
  • aws sesv2 create-dedicated-ip-pool —pool-name dedicated1 —scaling-mode MANAGED
• # Create a configuration set that that will send through the dedicated pool
  • aws sesv2 create-configuration-set —configuration-set-name cs_dedicated1 —delivery-options SendingPoolName=dedicated1
• # Configure the configuration set as the default for your sending identity
  • aws sesv2 put-email-identity-configuration-set-attributes —email-identity {{YOUR-SENDING-IDENTITY-HERE}} —configuration-set-name cs_dedicated1
• # Send SES email through the API or SMTP without requiring any code changes. Emails will # be sent out through the dedicated pool.
  • aws sesv2 send-email –from-email-address “{YOUR-SENDING-IDENTITY-HERE}}” –destination “ToAddresses=success@simulator.amazonses.com” —content ‘{“Simple”: {“Subject”: {“Data”: “Sent from a Dedicated IP Managed pool”},”Body”: {“Text”: {“Data”: “Hello”}}}}’

Monitoring

We recommend customers onboard to event destinations and delivery delay events to more accurately track the sending performance of their dedicated sending.

Conclusion

In this blog post we explained the benefits of sending via a Dedicated IPs (Managed) feature as well as how to configure and begin sending through a Managed Dedicated IP. Dedicated IPs (Managed) pricing can be reviewed at the pricing page for SES here.