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We need to send transactional emails from our e-commerce website hosted on an EC2 instance. Our regular email service is hosted by Google.

The problem is that we are based in Asia-Pacific region where SES is not available. So can we change our region just for using SES? Will it impact our EC2 instance? Can't find any documentation regarding this.

Falcon Momot
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Golmaal
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  • As of June 2015 Amazon still doesn't support Asia-Pacific. I've encountered the same issue. – Green Jun 22 '16 at 06:03

2 Answers2

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(Note: I think you mean different "regions" and not different "zones". In AWS a "zone" refers to an availability zone inside a given region. I will assume you mean regions here; SES is a region level service.)

Yes, as you say SES is not currently available in the Asia-Pacific region.

However, there is no reason you cannot connect cross-region to an SES service from your existing region. You do not need to change your app in your existing region to do this. While SES and networking best practices suggest you would want to choose an endpoint closest to your application, to reduce network latency, there is no SES requirement for your app instance to be in the same region as your SES service. Assuming you are using SMTP/S to send email, the email server can be anywhere on the internet.

You can configure your app in Asia-Pacific to send email via the SMTP/S endpoint provided by SES in any region. Again, network latency may be an issue, but depending on your mail volume, I would not expect network latency to be prohibitive. In fact I believe this setup is quite common for users in regions where SES is not supported.

I would suggest you setup the SES service in any of the available regions (say EU-Ireland), and run some basic load testing and see how the latency affects your application, if at all.

For more info, see Connecting to the Amazon SES SMTP Endpoint

Rodrigo Murillo
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    Thanks a lot for the inputs. I just completed the SES formalities (domain verification, email verification, SMTP credentials generation, etc.) and successfully sent a test email. So I guess it should also work programmatically from my EC2 instance. – Golmaal Oct 16 '15 at 06:56
  • @Golmaal, Hi, is your application still using this SES setup? If yes, can you provide some statistic and if no, could you clarify why and what have you switched to? – Joe. L Nov 15 '18 at 05:36
  • As of December 2019 Amazon supports several regions in Asia: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/ses.html?shortFooter=true#ses_region – Slava Abakumov Dec 10 '19 at 16:26
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Workaround: Use Pinpoint which internally uses SES. Pinpoint is available in India region. After creating a project, you can configure settings for Email/SMS. The standard procedures of Domain verification, Addition of DNS records (generated in aws console), Email address verification are present here as well. You can proceed to fetch the SMTP details or the API, with which you can start sending emails. The bounce configuration cannot be done via console like in SES. Instead, you can opt for streaming to Kinesis and then write custom queries to get all the stats. Hope this helps.

Ben Ross
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