SES, without buying a domain

Amazon SES sends the mail. Stay in ap-south-1. Same IAM user as before.

You do not need a domain. Gmail, Outlook, college mail. Verify the address you can actually open.

Swipe to pan

New AWS accounts are in a sandbox. You cannot email the whole planet.

We've already verified:

Address	Use
`sreecharan309@gmail.com`	From (`MAIL_FROM`)
`o210008@rguktong.ac.in`	a second person signing up

aws sts get-caller-identity
aws sesv2 get-account --query ProductionAccessEnabled
aws sesv2 list-email-identities

Open SES Identities → create identity → Email address (not Domain) → click the AWS link in that inbox.

Don't From: club@made-up.com. SES will laugh.

Want a second inbox?

aws sesv2 create-email-identity --email-identity o210008@rguktong.ac.in

"Send to anyone" is production access. Takes forever. Skip it today.

AWS_REGION=ap-south-1
MAIL_FROM=sreecharan309@gmail.com

Leave SMTP out of .env. We never installed Nodemailer. If you point at *.mail-manager-smtp.amazonaws.com, SMTP says 250 and Gmail never shows up.

It will land in Spam. That's success.

Gmail sees Gmail-via-SES plus a localhost link and freaks out. Red banner. External. Whatever.

Don't click the link in college webmail. That browser is not your laptop. Copy token= and curl:

curl -s "http://localhost:4000/auth/verify?token=PASTE_TOKEN_HERE"