An Intro to Email Hosting World With Amazon Workmail

Hi everyone! Today I wanted to create a series, my third series to be exact. In this case, I wanted to talk about email. Yes, email is being one of the most important thing for us. I think nowadays everyone has at least one email since anything is starting to go digital. Each has various purposes, such as:

• Personal: banking, digital IDs, etc.
• Business: e-commerce, customer support, communication with partner, etc.
• Many more

For personal purposes, you can create free email from some popular email providers. Why? Because you might not need very big size of mailbox for some things like creating account, verifying something, saving banking transaction or online shopping history. I think there are many email providers give us pretty enough quota along with any other features such as calendar, notes, etc.

BUT

When it comes to business, email is a very important thing and it’s like being a part of company’s identity. You know, I was a System Engineer on ISP and everyday I faced many customer’s email issues. Here I will share one of them which is a big deal and tell you in short.

Domain Spoofing

Yes, a client almost lost their money because of the “attacker” using almost similar domain. For example, the official domain is aws.com then the “attacker” is using avvs.com. So, it’s very important to have a high level of accuracy. Other people might know what’s our plan or our other business without we realize it. Then, they’ll be easily attack you since they already know what “have you done”, “are doing”, and “will do”. So, please be careful especially for social engineering! This is just one of other many email issues.

It’s unusual thing for a business or government company to use free email. I mean when we’re looking for any information about a company, we’ll think about their official website and contact (email) in addition to phone number. So they should have their own official domain as trusted identity.

Now let’s talk about email services! When I think about AWS, Amazon SES came in my mind. Yes, I used to think that it was the only one 🙂 but I wasn’t completely wrong, right? As we all know, SES is Simple Email Service. When we search AWS email services, SES is on top for that keyword. But for daily communication like send/receive emails, I prefer to use Amazon Workmail. I also don’t see that using EC2 as mail server is the best practices, considering that the associated ports are not allowed to be opened as well.

Amazon SES vs Workmail

I’m not going to compare them to get the best service but I’m looking for the most suitable service depends on our needs. SES is best for sending emails for those who subscribes to your apps like transactional or marketing emails, but it doesn’t include POP or IMAP and I think that’s enough for being the reason why we don’t use SES for email hosting. Since we are able to do that with Workmail, so it’s suitable for our case.

Why Do We Choose Workmail and What Are The Benefits?

Since I’m new to this service, I’ll just mention some points:

• Only $4 for 50GB mailbox per month.
• Get free domain alias subdomain.awsapps.com (in case you haven’t buy domain) but if you have, you can use your own domain and all is under your control.
• Webmail client is provided along with calendar and contact as additional features.
• Integrated with Microsoft Exchange so you can setup email client on your mobile and of course along with the calendar.
• Many more, click here!

Alright! I think it’s enough for an intoduction. On the next posts of this series, we will do more things with Amazon Workmail. I’ll try my best to make it easy to follow so you can run your own email hosting for your business on AWS. Let’s get started!