SES Outbound now delivers to Mail Manager Archives
Dayanantha Shanmugaradnam
1.Introduction
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), a cost-effective and scalable email platform, now supports outbound email delivery to Mail Manager Archives. This feature enables organizations to automatically archive outgoing emails for compliance, legal, or business continuity purposes, streamlining email retention and audit processes without additional infrastructure or manual handling.
This capability is particularly beneficial for regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, and legal services, where email archiving is a critical requirement. With this update, SES Outbound customers can specify a Mail Manager archive as an additional destination for their email workloads. This allows for the retention of messages post-DKIM-signature, ensuring that every sent message is securely archived and easily retrievable. The Mail Manager archive offers a user-friendly search interface, enabling customers to locate indexed messages directly within the AWS Management Console or export them to an Amazon S3 bucket for further analysis.
To utilize this feature, customers need to configure the Mail Manager archive's Amazon Resource Name (ARN) in their SES Outbound configuration set. Proper IAM role permissions are required to ensure seamless integration. Once set up, each uniquely signed outgoing message is ingested into the archive, where it is indexed and made available for search and export.
2.What’s New?
The latest update to Amazon SES Outbound introduces the ability to deliver outbound emails directly to Mail Manager Archives. This feature allows organizations to securely archive sent emails post-DKIM-signature, ensuring compliance and easy retrieval. The Mail Manager archive provides a search interface within the AWS Management Console and supports exporting messages to Amazon S3 for further analysis2.
This enhancement simplifies email management workflows, strengthens compliance controls, and integrates seamlessly with existing systems. It's a valuable addition for businesses looking to streamline their email infrastructure2.
3.Key Benefits
1. Regulatory Compliance
Helps meet regulatory and legal requirements for data retention, such as GDPR, HIPAA, or FINRA.
Ensures that every outbound email is automatically archived and preserved.
2. Business Continuity and Risk Management
Safeguards against data loss, employee turnover, or malicious deletion.
Provides a centralized repository to review and retrieve past communications.
3. Simplified Operations
Removes the need for third-party archiving software or manual forwarding rules.
Seamless integration ensures zero-touch configuration after setup.
4. Search and Audit Capabilities
Enables searchable access to all sent emails for compliance officers, auditors, and administrators.
Facilitates internal investigations, customer support follow-ups, or dispute resolution.
4.How It Works
Configuration in SES:
Configure SES to use Mail Manager Archives as a delivery destination via custom delivery rules or configuration sets.
Apply sending rules to route specific outbound emails (based on domain, address, etc.) to the archive.
Email Delivery:
Outbound emails are sent through SES as usual.
A copy of each email is simultaneously delivered to Mail Manager Archives, where it is stored securely.
Archiving and Access:
Emails are indexed, encrypted, and stored in compliance with your retention policies.
Admins can access the archive using Mail Manager’s web interface or APIs.
5.Use Cases
6.Getting Started
Enable Integration:
Contact Mail Manager support or AWS support to enable SES delivery to Mail Manager Archives.
Create SES Configuration Set:
Use the SES console or CLI to define a configuration set with the archiving rule.
Test and Monitor:
Send test emails and verify delivery to both the recipient and the archive.
Use Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring delivery status and metrics.
7.Conclusion
With Amazon SES outbound support for Mail Manager Archives, AWS has significantly simplified email archiving for businesses. This new feature enhances compliance, security, and operational efficiency while ensuring outbound communications are reliably stored and easily retrievable. For organizations seeking robust, automated email archiving, this feature eliminates the complexity of manual solutions, offering a seamless, scalable, and cost-effective path to compliance and business continuity.