No AWS account yet?¶
You do not need one to try SESKit. Your first email goes to a local Mailpit inbox and needs nothing from Amazon.
You need one when you want mail to reach real people. This page is the short path there.
The ladder¶
Each rung is a real success, and you can stop at any of them.
| Step | Time | What you can do | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | Mailpit, no AWS | 60 seconds | Watch a message go through the whole pipeline |
| 1 | A verified email address | ~5 minutes | Send real mail to verified recipients |
| 2 | A verified domain | Minutes to 72h | Send as anything on your domain |
| 3 | Production access | ~24 hours | Send to anyone |
Most people should do 0 and 1 on the same afternoon, then start 2 and 3 and go do something else while they wait.
Creating the account¶
- Sign up at aws.amazon.com. It needs a payment card and a phone number; the card is verified with a small temporary charge.
- Choose a region close to your users and stay in it — SES identities, queues and configuration sets are per region, and mixing them up is the most common way to end up confused about why nothing arrives.
- Open the SES console once to confirm it is available in that region.
SES is not free, but it is close
Roughly \$0.10 per thousand emails, plus a few cents for the SNS and SQS traffic delivery events use. The free tier covers 3,000 message-charges a month for the first year.
A test instance sending a few hundred messages costs pennies. This is the cost advantage the whole project is built on.
Credentials for SESKit¶
SESKit needs an access key from an IAM user in your account. There is a step-by-step walkthrough: get an access key.
Do not use your root account credentials
The account you signed up with can do anything, including close the account. Create an IAM user, give it only the actions on the IAM policies page, and use that.
You paste the key into the SESKit dashboard. Nothing goes on the server, and there is no AWS CLI to install.
Then¶
- Connect the account — two read-only calls, creates nothing.
- Verify a sender — start with a single address; it needs no DNS.
- Leave the sandbox — the 24-hour wait, worth starting early.