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AWS SES + Gmail = Free Business Email ID

daltonfury42 on September 12, 2020

My website is hosted on AWS Free Tier, and I wanted to create a free company/business email address for people to contact me. If you are already on...

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Sebastian Weigand • Sep 14 '20

Pro-tip: You can do all of this with built-in functionality with Google Domains, where you can establish mail aliases and forwarding rules from your custom domain. There's no need for extra complication or additional services.

See this article for more information.

Anurag Singh • Sep 24 '20 • Edited

Thanks for this info, i was using improvmx till now even though I have a google domain.

daltonfury42 • Sep 14 '20

Yep, if your are willing to transfer your domain to Google Domains, this is looking very easy!

wandetri • Nov 2 '20 • Edited

Hi Thanks for this trick
Its Working!
but there is a problem, all of my sent email goes to Promotion tab in gMail Inbox

edit
After I modify the email content to longer and more 'personal' instead of 'Test Email', it goes to my main inbox.

Thanks!

Jörg Rech • Apr 1 '22

Hi! Just implemented it for one of my domains and it works really well - thank you! One question though: Do I need to "register" every name of a domain at Gmail or should it work out of the box? For example:

I have the following config in the Lambda code:

  forwardMapping: {
    "@<MY_DOMAIN>.com": [
      "<ME>@gmail.com"
    ]
  }

However, only @.com is forwarded to Gmail (where I added this email address) but emails to info@.com is only stored in S3 but not forwarded.

Meir Gabay • Sep 13 '20

An honest question - is this better than using Google's MX records in Route53? I'm trying to understand the benefits of this method

Ref - support.google.com/a/answer/614969...

daltonfury42 • Sep 13 '20 • Edited

I've not gotten chance to play with GSuite / GApps for business much, but I am guessing this works only when you have a paid GSuite Account?

This solution is when you have a free personal Google account. Please correct me if I am wrong, though.

Meir Gabay • Sep 13 '20 • Edited

I think you are right, my assumption was that you have a GSuite account since you talked about a "company/business email address". I don't think it's possible to use MX records with a personal account, thanks for the clarification

daltonfury42 • Sep 14 '20

Hey. Thanks for pointing this out.. I'll edit the post to make this clear.

Aftab Naveed • Dec 26 '23

I just tried configuring it on my GMAIL account, I was able to make the AWS SES part working and can see emails arriving to my S3 bucket, however when I try to connect my Gmails' "Send mail as " I get this error

Authentication failed. Please check your username/password.
Server returned error: "DNS Error: DNS type 'aaaa' lookup of smtp.email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com responded with code NXDOMAIN DNS type 'a' lookup of smtp.email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com responded with code NXDOMAIN, code: 553"

Shreyash Gupta • May 18 '21

Hi,

I am the Co-founder of Looseleaf which is a startup in the education sector of India. We currently want to get our domain emails using the AWS SES. I would like to ask if you would be interested in helping us out as it seems that you know what you are doing. Let's discuss further details below!
Contact Email: officiallooseleaf@gmail.com
Our website: looseleaf.in

daltonfury42 • May 21 '21

Hi Shreyash,

I'd be happy to help. Let's connect this weekend.

Shreyash Gupta • May 21 '21

Just send me an email with your times that you can hop on a google meets call this weekend and then we will go on from there!

andrewrooke • Sep 17 '20

While this may be a good way to get started quickly, have you thought through the implications for SPF and DMARC ?

Every time i create a business domain and email service, I ensure I configure SPF and DMARC (and ideally DKIM) to secure my email service.

ypk • Sep 15 '20

Your S3bucket Permissions throws an error: "Missing required field Principal"

daltonfury42 • Sep 16 '20

Hi,

Can you add SES as a principal to your bucket's policy? In my case, since I created the bucket from within SES, the policy was set for me.

stackoverflow.com/questions/418192...

ypk • Sep 18 '20

I've followed other tutorial linked in one of the replies. Yes you can add principal as it did allow me to.

I'll be honest, this instructions are not walk in the park, I was expecting a push button solution.

Lewis Cowles • Sep 14 '20

I sort of love you for this, but you can setup any email host just using route53 and likely own less of a footprint, and escape gmail

daltonfury42 • Sep 15 '20

Hey. I want to give this a try, can you give me a rough idea. Can I do this using my personal gmail account? Otherwise which mailbox providers allow this?

Lewis Cowles • Sep 15 '20

Sure, so I don't know how much you understand DNS, but the way I use a shared host to do this is to tell them I'm hosting a domain with them. I don't change the nameservers, because I love AWS and am cheap.

I can then go into their DNS settings, take out the MX records and place them into my AWS.

You can use AWS UI to do this, or Terraform, or any other IaC tooling that integrates with your cloud provider (doesn't have to be AWS, can be Azure, GCP or DigitalOcean AFAIK)

There are some gotchas. I don't think Heroku supports, but you can have heroku only own a CNAME.
Also you should not move other subdomains like webmail to your domain. Let the shared host do that with SSL and all the bells and whistles to secure your email from attackers. You can also front that with SES and forwarding rules, although I was gutted to see that.