Amazon Simple Email Service – Something new for spammers?

Amazon has released a new service called Amazon Simple Email Service, which is integrated with other AWS services, making it easy to send emails from applications being hosted on services such as Amazon EC2. The service is created for both businesses and developers and the pricing is really good (like most other Amazon cloud services). But will this service be used by spammers?

When you read the service presentation at Amazon it really sounds like it’s a new service to spam the world with unwanted emails. Just have a look at this text from their web site:

With Amazon SES there is no long-term commitment, minimum spend or negotiation required – businesses can utilize a free usage tier and after that enjoy low fees for the number of emails sent plus data transfer fees.

Hmm, no long term commitment needed? Isn’t that how spammers work. They spam as much as they can until they got shut down, and then they just try something else? It’s even possible to utilize some free usage before you have to pay (I wonder how long it will take for spammers to sign up lets say 1 000 accounts ).

Even some more text from their service presentation:

Building large-scale email solutions to send marketing and transactional messages is often a complex and costly challenge for businesses.

Isn’t it hard for spammers too? Now they don’t even have to invest in infrastructure at all to spam.

To be fair with Amazon they do fight spammers, or at least they say they do. This is a copy of the email I got the last time I reported a blog spammer to Amazon:

Hello.

Thank you for contacting Amazon Web Services. We take reports of unauthorized network activity from our environment very seriously. It is specifically forbidden in our terms of use.

Because Amazon EC2 Public IP addresses may change ownership frequently, without additional information we will be unable to identify the correct owner of the IP address for the period of time in question.   Please note that we are unable to view attachments.  When reporting abuse via email, all required information must be contained within the body of the email.

So that we can process your report and identify the actual customer in question, we require the following information:

* src IP
* destination IP (your IP)
* destination port
* Accurate date and time of activity, with timezone
* Intensity/frequency (short log extracts, no larger than 4KB; logs > 4KB will cause errors
* Your contact details (phone and email)

For a faster response, please file your report using the AWS Abuse form at the link below:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/html-forms-controller/AWSAbuse/

We appreciate your help in providing the necessary information requested.

Best regards,

-EC2 Abuse Team

Sounds good, right? But the thing is that after I had reported the requested information to them nothing that I could see happened and the blog spam continued 🙁 . And it has been the same story every time I reported a blog spammer to Amazon, so I don’t think they will do much about email spammers in their new service. After all they earn money from all spam sent using their servers 🙁

So, what do you think about the new email service from Amazon? Will it be used by spammers or legitimate users?