Can SES be used for email marketing?

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To kick things off, here's some of an internal Cloud.gov discussion:

So far we’ve framed SES as being for transactional emails (password resets, automated reports…) but not marketing. SES’s product pages from Amazon do not make that distinction, so in theory our customers could use it for mass emails. The important thing to understand, which is true for us just the same as if they’d directly used AWS, is that we’ll stop their ability to send mail if they get too many bounces or complaints — i.e., too many emails sent to invalid addresses, or too many of their messages marked as spam by recipients.

However, you won't find SES on any list of email marketing services, because it’s more like an engine you could use to power a sedan or a truck — not the truck itself.

That said, a dedicated email marketing service would also offer things like unsubscribe functionality which might be required by law (possibly the law where the recipients reside). That's not coming from the SES layer. If you're going to roll your own service on top of SES then you have to build out your own approach to that.