Amazon SES delivers email at $0.10 per 1,000 messages but provides no campaign UI, no list management, and no analytics. Mailblast is the marketing layer that fills those gaps - giving you subscriber management, campaign scheduling, automation workflows, and engagement tracking while all delivery routes through your own AWS account at SES prices.
The combination gives you something neither tool provides alone: the economics of infrastructure-level email pricing with the usability of a full marketing platform.
Key Takeaways
- Connecting Mailblast to Amazon SES is a paste-an-IAM-access-key-and-secret operation - no SMTP credentials, no manual SNS subscription work.
- All email delivery goes through your AWS account - Mailblast charges for the platform, not the sends.
- Bounce, complaint, and unsubscribe handling is automatic - Mailblast wires up the SNS topics it needs and suppresses problematic addresses across all your lists.
- You keep full ownership of your sending reputation and subscriber data - emails go out under your own domain with no platform branding.
Why Use Mailblast With Amazon SES?
The short version: Amazon SES is excellent infrastructure with no marketer-facing features. Mailblast adds the features without changing the infrastructure.
Without Mailblast (bare SES):
No list storage or management
No campaign builder
No scheduling or automation
No open/click tracking
Manual unsubscribe handling (your responsibility)
No template library
Every feature requires custom code
With Mailblast + SES:
Full subscriber list management with import, segmentation, and tagging
Campaign builder with scheduling
Automation workflows (welcome sequences, drip campaigns, re-engagement)
Open rate, click rate, and unsubscribe analytics
Automatic bounce and complaint suppression
All delivery at SES pricing: $0.10/1,000 emails
The trade-off is a Mailblast subscription on top of your AWS costs. At any volume above 20,000 emails/month, the combination is still cheaper than Mailchimp or most hosted alternatives.
Prerequisites
Before connecting Mailblast to SES, make sure you have:
- An AWS account with Amazon SES enabled.
- A verified sending domain in SES - DKIM CNAMEs, Custom MAIL FROM, and DMARC records published. The Mailblast help docs walk through this end-to-end: Setting up and verifying your SES account.
- Production access (not sandbox mode). See Moving out of the AWS SES Sandbox - without it you're capped at 200 emails per 24 hours to verified addresses only.
If you haven't completed SES setup, start there first - our SES setup guide covers the AWS side.
Step-by-Step: Connecting Mailblast to Amazon SES
Step 1: Create an IAM User for Mailblast
Mailblast authenticates to your AWS account with an IAM access key + secret - not SMTP credentials. You give it the smallest possible permission scope: SES sending plus four SNS calls so it can wire up its own bounce/complaint topics.
The full walkthrough lives in the help docs: Creating your AWS Credentials. The short version:
- In the IAM console, create a policy named
Mailblastwith this JSON:
{
"Version": "2012-10-17",
"Statement": [
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": [
"ses:*",
"sns:ListTopics",
"sns:CreateTopic",
"sns:GetTopicAttributes",
"sns:Subscribe"
],
"Resource": ["*"]
}
]
}
- Create an IAM user named
Mailblast, attach the policy directly, and skip console access - programmatic access only. - Open the user's Security credentials tab, Create access key, choose Third-party service, and save both the Access key and Secret access key. AWS only shows the secret once.
Step 2: Paste the Credentials into Mailblast
In Mailblast, open AWS Settings, paste the Access key and Secret access key, and save. Mailblast verifies the credentials by listing your SES identities and provisioning the SNS topics it needs for bounce and complaint feedback - that's the work that the sns:CreateTopic and sns:Subscribe permissions in step 1 are for. There is no manual webhook subscription, no SMTP host, no port to enter.
Step 3: Send a Test Campaign
Create a test list with a couple of your own addresses, build a quick campaign, and send. Mailblast's test-send flow lets you preview deliverability against Gmail, Outlook and Apple Mail before going wider.
Verify on the inbox side:
- Email lands in the inbox, not spam
- Open and click tracking are recorded against the campaign
- The from name and address match your SES-verified domain
- The unsubscribe link is present and works
If everything checks out, you're ready to import your real subscriber list and start sending.
What Mailblast Handles Automatically
Once connected to SES, Mailblast manages the operational complexity that would otherwise require custom code:
Bounce suppression. Hard bounces are added to your suppression list the moment SES reports them. Repeat soft-bouncers are retired automatically so they stop counting against your delivery rate - see How does Mailblast handle bounces?.
Complaint suppression. Spam complaints are suppressed across all of your lists, not just the one that triggered the complaint. The campaign report records who complained - see What is a Spam Complaint?.
List unsubscribes. Every campaign includes a one-click unsubscribe link and Mailblast processes the removal automatically. You can point unsubscribers at your own custom landing page once they've been unsubscribed.
Rate limiting. Mailblast respects your SES per-second send rate, so you never overshoot your account's quota mid-campaign.
Typical Monthly Cost: Mailblast + Amazon SES
Mailblast bills for the platform; AWS bills you separately for SES delivery. The free Mailblast plan covers 1,000 contacts and 12,000 emails/month, and paid plans start at $17/month for 15,000 contacts - see the Mailblast pricing page for the full breakdown.
At 100,000 emails/month, the SES side is around $10 (base sending only, per the Amazon SES Pricing page - the per-GB data transfer fee applies to attachment bytes, not the HTML body, so it's effectively zero for typical marketing email). Compare against Mailchimp Standard at the equivalent contact count - typically $135/month and growing per contact, not per send. See the help article for a worked example of SES costs at small list sizes.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to connect Mailblast to Amazon SES?
Pasting the IAM access key and secret into Mailblast's AWS Settings page takes about a minute. The bigger time sink is upstream AWS work: verifying your sending domain and exiting the SES sandbox. End to end, a fresh setup is usually 30–60 minutes - most of that waiting on DNS and the AWS sandbox review.
Do I need AWS technical knowledge to use Mailblast with SES?
Basic familiarity with the AWS console is helpful. You create an IAM user with a small SES + SNS policy, generate an access key, and paste it into Mailblast - the Creating your AWS Credentials help article walks through each click. Bounce, complaint and unsubscribe handling are wired up automatically.
Will Mailblast automatically handle my bounce rate to keep my SES account in good standing?
Yes. Mailblast suppresses hard bounces and complaints across all your lists the moment AWS reports them, and retires repeat soft-bouncers, so every send goes to a cleaner list than the last one. Bounce, complaint and unsubscribe rates show up on each campaign's report - see Understanding your Campaign Report.
Can I switch from Mailchimp to Mailblast + Amazon SES?
Yes. Export your subscriber list from Mailchimp as a CSV and import it into Mailblast. Your SES domain reputation is separate from Mailchimp's, so if you've never sent from this domain before, ramp the first few sends to your most engaged segment - see our SES warm-up guide.