Every email you send contributes to your organization’s reputation in the eyes of internet providers and spam filters. A strong reputation ensures that your messages reach inboxes quickly; a weak one means more messages land in spam. When sending through Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), one of the key tools to control and protect your reputation is the Dedicated IP Pool.

In traditional on-premise setups, many companies used multiple Postfix servers with different IP addresses. Each IP handled a specific type of email traffic — for instance, transactional notifications, customer support messages, or newsletters — to isolate reputations and manage priorities. As organizations move to AWS SES, this same concept translates into Dedicated IP Pools.

SES lets you group IP addresses into pools and assign each pool to a specific email configuration or type of traffic. That way, the reputation of each pool remains independent — a spike in marketing complaints won’t affect the delivery of critical password reset emails.

Here are common patterns where dedicated pools make sense:

1. Transactional vs. Marketing Separation
   Keep transactional emails (like OTPs, receipts, password resets) isolated from marketing or promotional messages. Even if recipients unsubscribe or mark marketing emails as spam, your important system messages still deliver reliably.

2. Priority-Based Sending
   Assign different pools for high, medium, and low priority traffic — for example, operational alerts, user notifications, and digests. This ensures control over deliverability and prioritization.

3. Regional Segmentation
   Global senders may separate email traffic by region (e.g., EU vs. US) to meet compliance and deliverability needs specific to local providers.

4. Customer or Product Segmentation
   Multi-product or multi-tenant companies can dedicate separate pools per product line or large customer group to avoid cross-impact.

AWS offers two models that fit different operational styles:

• You permanently lease and manage specific IPs.

• You control warm-up (gradually increasing send volume to build reputation).

• You decide when to add or remove IPs.

• Best for stable, predictable daily sending volumes.

• AWS automatically handles IP assignment, warm-up, and scaling.

• The number of IPs adjusts dynamically to your real sending needs.

• AWS continuously optimizes deliverability behind the scenes.

• Best for variable or unpredictable send volumes.

We have chosen Managed Dedicated IP Pools for all our SES email traffic. Our daily volume ranges from 10,000 to 50,000 emails, depending on user activity and application usage. Such variability makes manual IP warm-up and scaling inefficient.

Each of our three traffic priorities — high, medium, and low — uses a separate Managed Dedicated IP Pool. This structure provides three key benefits:

1. Reputation isolation – High-priority transactional messages are protected from any issues in other categories.

2. Automatic scaling – IP capacity grows or shrinks based on our needs, ensuring performance without throttling.

3. Operational simplicity – No manual IP warm-up or management is required, reducing maintenance effort.

• Consistent Delivery: Important messages like password resets or alerts arrive reliably, even during high-volume periods.

• Improved Deliverability: AWS continuously optimizes IP usage and scaling to preserve sender reputation.

• Resilience: Separate IP pools mean one traffic type’s problem won’t harm others.

Dedicated IP pools in AWS SES provide a clean way to separate and protect different email traffic types. For organizations with dynamic sending patterns, Managed Dedicated IP Pools strike the right balance — offering reliability, flexibility, and automation without sacrificing reputation management.

In short: We use Managed Dedicated IP Pools to ensure all messages — from critical notifications to newsletters — are delivered efficiently, safely, and with the best possible reputation.