These days, teams have plenty of ways to communicate, through video conferencing, phone calls, instant messaging apps and more. However, email is still one of the most popular ways to connect with colleagues and customers alike. It’s simple, straightforward, and something most of us are familiar with. In fact, there are more than 4.481 billion email users worldwide.
The trouble is, maintaining security and compliance standards in the email landscape is incredibly difficult. Handling governance, risk, and compliance for every email workload to, from and through your domains is complicated. That’s particularly true when you’re dealing with countless inbound emails, and multiple types of outbound emails, from marketing messages to transactional email.
Only a fraction of companies have the tools they need to proactively manage email at scale. Fortunately, there are ways to manage your email workflows, with Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) Mail Manager.
The Challenge: Maintaining Email Governance
Reports show that, despite the rise of new communication technologies, 86% of business professionals still prefer to use email for professional communications. However, managing email, particularly at scale, is incredibly difficult. Routing and processing emails, to ensure they reach the right teams, while leveraging the right security strategies is complicated. Many companies regularly identify email as a security weak spot, thanks to the rise in spoofing, phishing, and other activities.
Additionally, outbound email flows are becoming more complex. Multiple users in a business send emails from different locations and applications, making it harder to keep track of critical data flowing in and out of the organization.
Over time, a lack of control can lead to fragmented communications, lost data, and significant digital governance risks. To address this issue, businesses need a robust, scalable solution that allows them to manage email workflows, automate inbound email processing, and strengthen compliance.
Improving Email Management with Amazon SES Mail Manager
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), created by Amazon Web Services (AWS), has long offered companies a flexible, cloud-based email sending service for both inbound and outbound email management.
Recently, Amazon SES released Mail Manager, a set of features that allows companies to strengthen their email infrastructure, simplify workflow management, and improve compliance. It can integrate with existing infrastructure, connect the gaps between business applications, and automate inbound email processing. Plus, this system gives companies a comprehensive solution for archiving emails, for digital communications governance purposes.
Here's how companies can enhance email management, with Amazon SES and Mail Manager.
Building Custom Ingress Endpoints
Ingress endpoint solutions allow companies to apply custom filtering policies and rules to emails, to determine which messages should be allowed into an ecosystem, and which should be rejected. In the past, Amazon SES offered a simple ingress solution via Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). With Mail Manager, however, customers can choose between two different ingress options.
Open Ingress endpoints enable users to create unique SMTP endpoints that allow you to accept or reject emails based on your specific needs. You simply need to point your domain’s MX record to the endpoint, and it begins receiving emails automatically.
Authenticated Ingress Endpoints in Mail Manager allows SES to accept emails from trusted SMTP servers for additional processing. Users can then create traffic policies to configure trusted SMTP servers with any type of ingress endpoints.
Fine-Tuning Management with Traffic Policies and Rule Sets
Traffic policies give companies more extensive controls over the inbound emails they accept or reject. They basically allow the system to block specific types of emails, or allow certain messages based on various conditions and components. This gives users more control over things like blocking or allowing emails sent from a specific address, IP range, or TLS protocol version.
