Building Email Outreach on AWS SES: The Hidden Engineering Scope

Short summary

AWS SES looks like cheap cold-email infrastructure but is only a sending pipe — everything else (bounce handling, reply capture, warmup, compliance, monitoring) must be built and maintained in your own code. Bounce rates above 5% or complaint rates above 0.1% risk account suspension, making cold outreach on shared IPs a gamble. SES is the right choice only if you're building email infrastructure as a product, not for a one-off campaign.

• •SES is a sending pipe, not an outreach system — bounce handling, reply capture, warmup, and compliance are all DIY
• •Bounce rate >5% or complaint rate >0.1% can trigger AWS account review or suspension
• •Only viable if you treat email infra as a multi-week build with permanent ops overhead

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