Thanks NuclearDog,
Upon further review, I think the answer to the question is to call the api repeatedly, x times (below from the SES FAQ).
Lets say we are sending out 200K mailings. First, I would be very interested to know the realistic limit for how many "ToAddresses" we can tack on to one mailing. Once we know that, we could maybe batch sends into groups of 100 or so "ToAddresses" at a time.
Second, as with most bulk mailings, the content is slightly different per recipient, even if it is just a "Hello ," intro. Given that the mailing body will, while similar, will have personalization per email, I believe the expectation is simply to call the api over and over. I was thinking perhaps there would be some way to queue up multiple emails with one call, then do a send, but this is likely not realistic given the nature of the API.
SES is probably intended to be a bit more scalable in this fashion using one of the Amazon AWS database products.
For now, I think I would have to implement a queue or message system to call the api X times in an efficient so that all the api calls 1) don't take all day, and 2) don't tax our systems too much.
Q: Can I use Amazon SES to send bulk
email? Yes. Simply call the SendEmail
or SendRawEmail APIs repeatedly for
each email you would like to send.
Software running on Amazon EC2, Amazon
Elastic MapReduce, or your own servers
can compose and deliver bulk emails
via Amazon SES in whatever way best
suits your business. If you already
have your own bulk mailing software,
it’s easy to update it to deliver
through Amazon SES – either by
modifying the software to directly
call Amazon SES, or reconfiguring it
to deliver email through an Amazon SES
SMTP relay as described above.
