Amazon to offer bulk e-mail under web services platform

Amazon on Tuesday debuted a new bulk e-mail solution for businesses and developers as part of its web services offering. According to the company, Amazon SES is intended to take out the complexity of sending large amounts of e-mail for smaller businesses while ensuring delivery in a timely manner.

Users would receive their first gigabyte of data transfer at no charge, and would be free to those who use Amazon Web Service's EC2 cloud or Elastic Beanstalk application-management service as long as it falls within their bandwidth allocations. 2,000 e-mails per day would be covered under the free plan.

Additional e-mails would be charged at a rate of $.10 per thousand, the company said. After the first gigabyte, data would be charged at a sliding rate of between 8 and 15 cents per gigabyte.

SES may be of the most benefit to companies who may not have extensive IT budgets, as all the overhead is paid by Amazon. For Amazon itself, providing such a service even with such large volume should not be a problem: it already has extensive infrastructure due to its online commerce efforts.