Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) for bulk e-mail, NOT for transactional e-mails?
The Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) self-described as a "highly scalable and cost-effective bulk and transactional email-sending service".
From everything that I can gather, and by perusing the AWS SDK as well as the SES guides and API, it looks great for transactional emails (i.e. application emails sent in a one-off fashion), but I cannot find anything about bulk emailing.
Based on the price-point, Amazon clearly wants/needs customers to send very large quantities of mail.
Is the expectation that you (as someone implementing Amazon SES) make individual calls per email send?
i.e. If you are sending a marketing email to 200,000 recipients, do you really make 200K requests to the SendEmail or SendRawEmail via curl (or whatever) or using the AWS sdk?
This seems impractical.
Answer
The docs now clearly state that you can add up to 50 recipients per message. So you can divide up your sender list in batches; for 200k recipients you would have to make 4k API calls. Not terribly convenient for bulk mails; I would guess Amazon is not orienting their service for this particular use.