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SES’ New Managed Dedicated IP Capabilities

In the world of email, sending emails over dedicated IPs can provide a number of benefits, including greater control over reputation and the ability to manage email deliverability. However, the heavy lifting involved in setting up and managing a dedicated IP can be intimidating, especially for those who are new to the process.

In this blog post, we’ll explain the benefits of using managed dedicated IPs from Amazon SES and how the new features, whether you’re a seasoned email professional or just getting started, will help take your email sending to the next level. Throughout the post, we’ll explain how managed dedicated IPs removes all of the heavy lifting of setting up, provisioning, monitoring and managing sending over dedicated IPS, how it helps ensure that IPs warm up efficiently, effectively and quickly, how you can get insights into how your IP Pool is performing, and how you can easily convert your current standard dedicated IPs to managed dedicated IPs. By the end of this post, you’ll have a solid understanding of the benefits of using a managed dedicated IPs for your email sending.

With the latest release of managed dedicated IPs, SES customers now have insights into the performance of their dedicated IPs, can easily convert their current dedicated IPs (standard) Pools into managed dedicated IP pools and can now create up to 50 dedicated IP pools.

What are managed dedicated IPs?

With standard IPs, users are provided an aggregate sending capacity, which is a combination of the capacity of all receiving Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook etc. However, each receiving ISP has a different capacity that depends on the reputation they assign to your dedicated IPs. For example, if you have a recipient list that consists of 800,000 individuals and your IP has a daily capacity of 1M emails. In this case you may assume that you have enough capacity to send all of your daily emails via your dedicated IP. However, the daily IP capacity may be made up of 400,000 of Gmail capacity and 600,000 of Yahoo capacity. If your recipient list consists of 500,000 Gmail addresses and 300,000 Yahoo addresses then your capacity on Yahoo is fine but you are over your capacity on Gmail and you will require another dedicated IP to manage your sending volume to Gmail. This is a simplistic example consisting of two major ISPs. Now consider how many different ISPs they are and how many different recipient email domains that your list consists of and you can easily see how complex this problem becomes. To solve this, many customer over-provision dedicated IPs i.e. they lease extra just in case they need the capacity. However, this approach doesn’t work as to build reputation (and capacity) on an IP you must send regularly and at a sufficient volume. You can’t just lease and hold a dedicated IP just in case you need it sometime.

With dedicated IP’s managed, your sending capacity is calculated at an ISP level, not at an aggregate level. What this means is that if your recipient list contains a large proportion of emails that get sent to a single ISP, then dedicated IPs managed will allocate you the optimal number of IPs to manage your sending capacity for that ISP. Customers don’t have to monitor the volume and manually calculate how many IPs they need to request, managed dedicated IPs does it all for you. When you need more IPs to manage your volume, managed dedicated IPs automatically provisions them, removing all of the heavy lifting and guesswork involved. And to give you insights into this, there is a range of metrics, accessible from within the SES console.

There are now two simple ways to get started with managed dedicated IPs. Users can just log on the AWS Console and load the configuration section of the SES Console. Select “Dedicated IPs”, and click “Enable dedicated IPs”.

If you have previously leased several standard dedicated IP addresses to use with Amazon SES, you would have created groups of those addresses, called dedicated IP pools. Grouping dedicated IPs together in a pool makes them easier to manage. A common scenario is to create one pool for sending marketing communications, and another for sending transactional emails. Your sender reputation for transactional emails is then isolated from that of your marketing emails. In this scenario, if a marketing campaign generates a large number of complaints, the delivery of your transactional emails is not impacted. If you already have dedicated IPs (standard) pools you can now convert these pools to managed IP pools in one click. Converting from a dedicated IP (standard) pool to a dedicated IP (managed) pool automatically transfers all of your standard IPs over to managed. So, you keep the same set of IPs, but you no longer have to worry about monitoring and managing them. You will no longer be charged per IP that you lease, but rather by the volume of emails that you send. For more information on pricing see the SES pricing page. There is one thing to be aware of before you switch; As managed dedicated IPs is optimized to allocate the number of IPs that you need for your sending volumes, if you have leased more dedicated IPs (standard) than you need then the redundant IPs will be removed. The only use case this may affect is where you have allowlisted specific dedicated IPs in downstream applications. You will need to be careful as managed dedicated IPs may automatically remove these IPs and you will no longer be sending emails from them. In this case, we recommend that you don’t switch to managed dedicated IPs.

How to create managed dedicated IPs

To create your dedicated IP (managed) pool, in Scaling mode select “Managed (auto managed)”, enter a name for your IP pool and associate it with a configuration set. Click ”Create Pool“ and your pool will be created. Previously, you could only create 5 managed dedicated IPs pools but with this release, you can now create 50 dedicated IP Pools (this can be 50 managed dedicated IPs pools or 50 dedicated IPs (standard) pools or a combination of both not exceeding 50).

Once you have created your pool you can access it from the Managed IP pools tab on the Dedicated IPs page. Once you have started to send email via your managed dedicated IPs pool then you can access metrics on the performance of your IPs. when you first start sending via managed dedicated IPs, your email volume will be split between your dedicated IPs and the shared SES IP pool. This is because when IPs are new, they have no reputation with receiving ISPs and therefore, have little capacity. Over time, receiving ISPs, based on variables such as the quality of content, the engagement rates, and your sending patterns, will increase capacity. If you try to send too much volume immediately via your dedicated IPs, receiving ISPs may flag this as a spam attempt and block, or throttle, the IP. managed dedicated IPs ensures that this will never happen by only sending the capacity that each receiving ISPs is willing to accept from the IPs and routes the excess to a shared IP pool to ensure that your email is still sent. This helps to build trust and quickly increase the capacity of the IPs, leading to a better reputation and quicker warm-up times. Over time, you will see a decrease in your email volume being sent via shared until all of it gets routed via dedicated IPs. Once your IPs are fully warmed up, if there is a spike in your email volume that exceeds the receiving ISP capacity, instead of routing the excess volume through shared, managed dedicated IPs will queue the excess volume and retry when there is capacity. This ensures that, when you have established reputation on your dedicated IPs, then all of your sending will be routed through them. You can easily see how much of your traffic is being sent via dedicated IPs versus how much is being routed through shared IPs in the Managed pool volume and Percentage of send volume via dedicated IPs metrics.

One of the key benefits of managed dedicated IPs is the ability to see your IP performance at an ISP level. Senders are able to see how much volume each ISP will accept from their IP pool. This helps to reassure that you are building reputation with the receiving ISPs and also gives you insights into the available contingent capacity should you have a sudden spike in volume. The ISP Capacity metric provides insights to your sent email volume versus the available capacity of the top 10 most popular ISPs.

Dedicated IPs (managed) is in all regions supported by SES. Visit the Amazon SES documentation for more information.