# 2. Use AWS SES for transactional emails
Date: 2020-03-10
Driver: Wisen Tanasa
# Status
Accepted
# Context
We're trying to decide on the service that we should use to send transactional emails. This was captured at UPMO-110.
The first choice of tool that we wanted to use for transactional e-mail is Mandrill, due to the following reasons:
- Wisen was not comfortable using AWS SES as it didn’t support a dedicated IP pool
- Nick is comfortable with Mandrill as he has experience with the Mandrill (+ Mailchimp)
After a quick test, however, I’m losing confidence in using Mandrill as from the outset, Mailchimp is trying to make it difficult for us to use it, mainly:
- There is no free tier, we can’t further test Mandrill without paying for Mailchimp Standard tier ($50 per month)
- The documentation to set up Mandrill is out of date
- For us to get started on Mandrill, we need Mailchimp account
On further research, many people are moving away from Mandrill because of the same reason.
We also needed a tool that will work well with Auth0. For reference purposes, there are many other tools that we looked at from the high level:
- https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/best-smtp-providers/
- https://deliciousbrains.com/ses-vs-mailgun-vs-sendgrid/
# Decision
We'll be using AWS SES to send transactional emails.
# Consequences
As we are already in AWS, it is very easy for us to use AWS SES. We did not look into other tools in depth as I see a transactional email tools as a utility, and it's something that we can replace later on.
One of the major downside of using AWS SES is the lack of capability to have a Dedicated IP Pool. This downside however has gone away as AWS SES is now supporting it.
The consequence of using AWS versus other tools are we will not have an extensive analytics capability. It tracks open rates for example, but further development might be necessary to analyse the data.