Amazon SES Setup: The Things Nobody Tells You (Bounce Handling, DKIM, IAM)

📖 Full guide with all code snippets and DNS records: Amazon SES Setup — The Complete Guide Every Amazon SES tutorial on Google shows outdated screenshots and zero mention of what happens when your bounce rate spikes and AWS silently kills your account . This post covers the parts that actually bite you in production. Why SES? The Math Is Simple Provider 100,000 emails/month SendGrid ~$90 Amazon SES ~$10 That's not a rounding error. One order of magnitude cheaper. For a bootstrapped SaaS sending transactional emails, that compounds fast. The trade-off: AWS does not hold your hand. Misconfigure it and your emails land in spam — or your account gets permanently revoked. Step 1: Understand the SES Sandbox Every new AWS account starts sandboxed. Hard limits apply: Max 200 emails per 24 hours Max 1 email per second You can only send to pre-verified email addresses To escape the Sandbox, open a support case under Service Limit Increase → SES Sending Limits . ⚠️ Don't submit this ticket yet. B