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.
After building policies to “permit” certain messages to reach Mail Manager, users can then use custom rule sets to apply additional logic for routing, additional functions, delivery, and archiving. This ensures businesses can easily ensure emails are reaching the right place, without compromising on security. Mail Manager even allows rules to be applied to individual recipients, or all recipients, as needed, giving businesses more precise control over their inbound email rules.
Integrating Email Processing Workflows with SMTP Relay
One of the biggest challenges in email governance, is bringing multiple inbound email processing workflows and external email infrastructure solutions together. Companies might work with a number of third-party gateways, and on-premises systems, like Microsoft Exchange Servers.
The SMTP Relay function in Mail Manager helps businesses to connect the dots, linking email flows to appropriate servers based on predefined criteria. Users can create rule sets and conditions to email flows, ensuring messages are appropriately filtered, then delivered to the right Ingress endpoint.
This solution gives companies a single, seamless experience for managing and overseeing all email workflows in one unified environment.
Optimizing Email Archiving
As digital communications governance requirements continue to evolve, organizations are forced to deal with increasingly complex rules about how they collect, store, and manage emails. A comprehensive archiving system, which allows companies to create retention rules, securely store data, and search for information quickly is a must-have.
The integrated email archiving solution in Mail Manager gives businesses complete control over how emails are stored, retained, and preserved. Companies can even implement conditions that allow Mail Manager to automatically archive a matching copy of an email whenever its received.
With the archive system, companies also get access to powerful search tools for locating specific emails, and they get to reduce the complexity and cost associated with maintaining emails on mail servers with a scalable, cost-effective cloud ecosystem.
Upgrading Security with Email Add-Ons
Finally, the Amazon SES solution supports a range of specialized security tools from approved providers that can help businesses take compliance, governance, and security to the next level. Add-Ons can be used as conditions within traffic policies, to further control which emails are allowed to reach Ingress endpoints. They can also be used as conditions in rule sets, to determine the actions taken when certain email types are received.
These add-ons give businesses a modular and flexible approach to customizing their email security strategy, allowing them to mix-and-match the tools that meet their specific needs. Plus, they reduce the cost of managing email, as you only pay for the capabilities you need with metered pricing.
There’s no separate integration or setup work required to implement these add-ons, and you can access, configure, and manage them easily within the AWS ecosystem.
Upgrading Email Governance with Amazon SES Mail Manager
Maintaining email governance in today’s digital world is becoming increasingly complex, particularly for larger businesses. Amazon SES Mail Manager gives businesses the tools they need to effectively control which emails can reach their servers, route them to the right people, and preserve essential data with archiving controls.
With end-to-end rule and policy management and comprehensive configuration options, every business can upgrade email security and minimize compliance risks. AWS provides an easy-to-use solution that integrates with the systems businesses already use, scales to match their needs, and offers a cost-effective way to manage email throughout the enterprise.
