I am new to setting up domains and actually had to get some help from AWS themselves to get it setup but it currently is running. Here is my setup and what I am trying to do:
I have a www.alkouri.com domain
a. The nameservers that Route 53 provided me are put into goDaddy DNS settings in hosted zones
b. The A Record is pointing to a cloudFront distribution (this is so that I can get the HTTPS running)
All of this is running fine, I am able to get to all variations of alkouri.com and it points to HTTPS no problem.
Now I want to be able to set up email going into a separate S3 bucket and this is where I am running into issues.
So in SES console I verify a new domain for www.alkouri.com and point in to the new S3 bucket and I try to send emails to blah@alkouri.com but nothing comes up.
I then try blah@www.alkouri.com and it works. Well obviously I don't want an email address with "www." in it so I create another hosted zone with just "alkouri.com." This generates 4 new AWS nameservers. I add these 4 nameservers to goDaddy and then everything just breaks. I quickly remove the 4 nameservers from GoDaddy and try many other things I found online and nothing seems to work.
Can someone point me in the right direction here? I just want to be able to send emails to @alkouri.com without the www.
As you attempted you will need another nameserver for your apex record domain.
You will need to migrate the records from your www public hosted zone into the one you create for the apex domain. Make sure that the records include the www part in their subdomain name when you import them.
Once you're happy that the records are copied switch the nameservers over as you previously tried. Finally add the record for the SES apex domain to your new public hosted zone.
There is no alternative if you have no configured DNS for the apex record as AWS will not be able to resolve the records to validate the domain.