How to verify email address in AWS SES

Question

I have bought a domain,then I have created domain identity in SES and verified it successfully, now comes the email part. I have created email address in identity management that is user@example.com (assume that example.com is my domain), documentation states that I need to go to the email inbox and click on the email but what inbox they mean? How can I access this inbox of this address that I've just created? If I have to use my own email here then what's the point of adding a domain If I can use gmail smtp straight away? Can someone please clarify this?

Answer 1

Here is the clear answer:

1. At first, you need to purchase and verify your domain in SES(you've done this already, it's good to go for next step)
2. You need to write a support ticket to move your SES account out from sandbox mode as it's in sandbox mode by default(You need to provide all info AWS requires in detail) moving out from sandbox mode

This might take 1 day around, finally you can get production SES status and check in your statistics section from SES console.

3. Next, you need to go AWS WorkMail service console and create your email accounts to be used for sender or receiver in your platform by your purchased domain(i.e, if your domain is abc.com, info@abc.com or support@abc.com). When I say creating email accounts, it says you need to create email address, username and password for each email account.

4. Finally, If you need to check out the inbox for above created accounts, WorkMail provides a cool web client for it.

Here is the WorkMail web client documentation from AWS It says this:

The web client URL looks like this: https://alias.awsapps.com/mail. Replace alias with the alias you received from your site administrator.

Here, alias is configured by you when you create your organization in WorkMail console.

The reason why SES requires to verify domain is something like ID verification of email sender, and verification of 3rd party email addresses gives us a flexibility to work with any other email addresses not registered in SES, also allow development and test before registration of domain in sandbox mode.

Cheers

Answer 2

AWS SES can receive emails and mostly this is used for automated email processing.

If you have verified in identity that you own the domain(by adding txt record in your domain DNS table) then by default you have verified all emails that fall in that domain. You don't have to follow the steps to verify individual emails by clicking the link received on the emails.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/verify-domains.html

From your example: since the domain examaple.com is verified, you don't have to again verify emails(user@example.com) that fall under same domain.

Individual email verification is for scenarios where you cant verify domain by placing dns records. Here you will not be able to receive emails, but if you still want to send emails from an address then you can verify it by clicking the link you receive on your inbox. This can be done with gmail or other mail providers.

Answer 3

The email address you want to verify must have existing mail service, before you can validate the address in SES.

From AWS docs, about receiving email https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/receiving-email.html

When you receive email, Amazon SES processes it according to instructions you provide. For example, Amazon SES can deliver incoming mail to an Amazon S3 bucket, publish it to an Amazon SNS topic, or send it to Amazon WorkMail.

If you need an inbox service, use Amazon WorkMail.

Creating a IAM user doesn't create an inbox. And SES has no inbox capability at all. The point of validation is to allow sending in behalf of the service. In certain use cases, you can process inbound email via Lambda, store attachments on S3 etc. but there is no POP3/IMAP inbox-like service included in the SES.

Creating an IAM user is not required to validate your email. That is only for authentication purposes for accessing AWS account services.