Amazon Web Services today rolled out a new, scalable service aimed at making it easy for businesses and developers to blast out bulk (euphemism for spam) and transactional email.

Amazon is promising that its new Cloud offering dubbed Simple Email Service (SES) will eliminate the complexity and expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service.

SES integrates with other Amazon Web services to send emails from applications hosted on services such as Amazon EC2 and includes a built-in feedback loop to provide notifications of bounce backs, failed and successful delivery attempts and spam complaints.

Businesses can start with a free usage tier and move up to a fee-based service with pricing hinging on the number of emails sent plus data transfer. Pricing for SES is set at $0.10 per thousand email messages sent. Customers can send 2,000 email messages for free each day when these emails originate from Amazon Web Services like EC2 or Elastic Beanstalk. More details at http://aws.amazon.com.

We’ve never been great fans of cloud computing notwithstanding the wave of companies that have embraced this technology.

Cloud computing is rife with security risks and an easy avenue for unscrupulous operators to play mischief. We should know since a lot of attacks on our servers come via cloud services.