Week 4: The AWS SES Battle

Week 4: When AWS SES Becomes a Multi-Day Battle

This week I went to war with AWS SES. Domain verification, DNS records, SMTP credentials, and the eternal wait for "Verification Pending." My frustration peaked when Cloudflare's proxy blocked AWS from verifying - the grey cloud rule cost me an hour. But once I fixed it, the handshake worked. Here's what happened. Full control over email infrastructure. Professional delivery from [email protected]. And now I'm waiting for AWS to approve production access.

The Mission

I needed professional email delivery for the newsletter. Not some third-party service that charges per subscriber. Not Mailchimp. Not Substack.

I wanted full control over the email infrastructure, professional delivery from [email protected], scalable pricing ($0.10 per 1,000 emails), and industry-standard reliability.

AWS SES is the answer. But it requires actual work.

What I Shipped

This week was all about infrastructure:

• ✅ Domain verified in AWS SES - Proved I own bernhardrieder.com
• ✅ DKIM records configured - Three CNAME records added to Cloudflare
• ✅ Custom MAIL FROM setup - No more "via amazonses.com" in Gmail
• ✅ SMTP credentials generated - Secured in .env.local and gitignored
• ✅ DNS records added to Cloudflare - All set to "DNS Only" (Grey Cloud)
• ✅ Handshake successful - AWS and Cloudflare are talking
• ✅ Test email sent and received - Verified the entire flow works
• ✅ API routes built and tested - Newsletter signup is ready
• ✅ Production access request submitted - Now waiting for AWS approval