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AWS SES Spam filter to keep pricing down

I am evaluating AWS SES - email receiving service for a use case. I noticed the pricing is per email. However, if some one will start sending bulk mail to the mail exchange do I still have to pay for the mail that were spam but AWS or SES rules identified them as spam. Is there some way around it?

Thanks

Solution

  • SES pricing depends on the size of the incoming mail chunk.

    An incoming mail chunk is 256 kilobytes (KB) of incoming data, including headers, message content (text and images), and attachments. When you use Amazon SES to receive an email, you pay $0.09 for every 1,000 incoming mail chunks.

    We only count complete incoming mail chunks. For example, if you receive 768KB of incoming email, we count it as three incoming mail chunks. If you receive 255KB of incoming email, we count it as zero incoming mail chunks.

    In summary, your SES receiving pricing depends on the number of emails you receive and also on the size of it. So if you want to bring down your costs one way is to limit the number of emails being received. You can achieve this by blocking incoming emails at two points in the email-receiving process: during the SMTP conversation, and after the SMTP conversation. You use IP address filters to block messages during the SMTP conversation, and receipt rules to block emails after the SMTP conversation.

    IP Address filters

    You can use IP address filters to block email that originates from specific IP addresses.

    • The benefit of using IP address filters to block unwanted mail is that AWS don't charge you for messages that are blocked during the SMTP conversation.
    • The drawback to using IP address filters is that they block email from the IP addresses you specify without performing any analysis on the actual content of the messages.

    Receipt Rules -

    You can use receipt rules to send a bounce notification to the sender of an email based on the address (or domain, or subdomain) that the message was sent to.

    • The benefit of using receipt rules is that you can perform additional analysis on incoming messages before you send a bounce notification to the sender.
    • The drawback to using receipt rules is that, because receipt rules are processed after the SMTP conversation, AWS bills you for each message that you receive. Additionally, you might also be charged for Lambda or other similar action you perform.

    Your Case

    In your case AWS has already performed analysis and marked them as spam. So you will be charged for the emails. For more info you can refer to this aws document - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/receiving-email-concepts.html#receiving-email-concepts-rules