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title: "Amazon SES Production Access Approval"
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date: 2023-10-03T04:34:37Z
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toc: false
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images:
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tags:
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---
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I've been setting up something for a relative who's trying to start a business,
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and as part of that they needed to be able to send transactional emails. After
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looking through some of the services available, Amazon SES looked like a good
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option. You get a fairly large number of emails for free every day, and
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additional emails are available at a decent price paid per email rather than the
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big "pay $X to get 10,000 more emails" kind of packages that most other
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providers seem to offer.
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## Let's sign up with AWS!
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So I signed up for AWS, created my access tokens, imported the SES client into
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the app, and verified a domain so I could start testing. Phew! It did work
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pretty painlessly at this point, I was sending my test emails and receiving them
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very quickly.
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But there's a weird thing Amazon does for SES where your SES account will start
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out in a sandbox mode where you can only send test emails to your own verified
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domains or inboxes. To actually start sending emails, you need to request
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approval first. I thought this was sort of a formality, but it turns out that's
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not the case because AWS very quickly rejected my request. Now I get it, spam
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emails are a big problem and Amazon doesn't want spammers abusing SES, which
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could hurt SES's email reputation. If you are unfamiliar, if email services
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decide your IP address is a spammer, your emails will start going straight into
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the spam filter. With SES, you use their shared IP addresses unless you pay
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extra to reserve your own IP address, so a spammer using SES would cause issues
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for everyone who's not paying for a dedicated IP.
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This was very frustrating though, because I then decided to sign up for SendGrid
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who banned my account immediately before I could even complete the sign up. It
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was a bizarre experience to receive a "here's the code to verify your email
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address" email and a "you have been banned, goodbye" email simultaneously. What
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did I even do?
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I was able to get approved after some back and forth with the AWS support team,
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and I wanted to write about this in case others hit this same issue because the
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feedback AWS gives you is basically nonexistant. When my request was rejected,
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the response I got just said:
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> We reviewed your request and determined that your use of Amazon SES could have
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> a negative impact on our service. We are denying this request to prevent other
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> Amazon SES customers from experiencing interruptions in service. For security
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> purposes, we are unable to provide specific details.
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Oof. I was especially confused because I had explicitly described that I would
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only be sending transactional emails to paying customers, and only once just to
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deliver their order after they had paid. This is as far away as you can get from
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spam, the only way you would receive an email is if you asked for it and paid.
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But I think I understand a few things AWS customer support team is looking for
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before they approve your request. I wish they would just describe this, but I
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guess that's the "security purposes".
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## What to put in your production access request
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1. Note how many emails you'll be sending. Give your best estimate. This won't
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be your sending limit, I said I'd send 100 emails a day and got a quota for
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50,000 emails per day. So there's no need to over-estimate to get a higher
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limit or to lie that you'll send less, your best estimate should be good
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enough.
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2. Explain what you'll do with bounces, complaints, and unsubscribe requests.
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These might not even make sense for you, for example in my case the emails
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will only be sent to paid customers after their successful transaction, there
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are no recurring emails so nothing to unsubscribe from. But explaining that
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wasn't enough for AWS, I had to also explain that I would stop sending emails
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to any bounced addresses or to anyone who complains. If you don't have the
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capability to do that in your code, make sure to implement it first.
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3. Attach at least 1 screenshot of the emails you'll be sending. A picture is
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worth a thousand words and all, I think this gets your point across much more
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quickly. I'm not sure if you can attach a picture to your initial request,
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but I think you can comment again to attach a picture afterwards without
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waiting for them to reject you.
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4. Write down where you'll be getting the email addresses to send emails to,
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even if it feels obvious. I had already said I was going to send emails to
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customers who bought something, but I think this wasn't clear enough. In
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followups I described that customers would enter their email addresses when
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making a purchase, and added a screenshot of the checkout page where it
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clearly says "your purchase will be sent to this email address". I think
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showing this also helped.
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I'm sure there are other things to consider and explain, but this worked for me.
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If you get denied, reopen the case, add even more screenshots and information
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and try again.
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## Brevo
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Alternatively, I also signed up for [Brevo](https://www.brevo.com/). It works,
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and was honestly easier to set up than SES because I didn't have to pull in AWS
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client libraries. Instead I just had to call `fetch` and that was it. Hey, here
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is the code for that actually:
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```ts
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export type Email = {
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sender: {
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name: string;
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email: string;
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};
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to: string;
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content: {
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text: string;
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html: string;
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};
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subject: string;
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};
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export async function sendEmailBrevo({
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sender,
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to,
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content: { html: htmlContent, text: textContent },
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subject,
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}: Email) {
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await fetch("https://api.brevo.com/v3/smtp/email", {
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method: "POST",
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headers: {
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accept: "application/json",
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"content-type": "application/json",
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"api-key": process.env.BREVO_API_KEY,
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},
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body: JSON.stringify({
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sender,
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to: [{ email: to }],
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subject,
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htmlContent,
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textContent,
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}),
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});
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}
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```
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