One big difference I noticed between Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure is that Azure doesn’t have built-in support for sending and receiving emails, while AWS has Simple Email Service (SES) (Aside: of my friends at Amazon says they’re running out of words to put between “simple” and “service”). This is probably because the power of the cloud has been harnessed to send spam emails in the past, and indeed, Azure compute IP blocks have been added to spam blacklists. To send emails from Azure, Microsoft recommends using an external service like SendGrid.
However, what if you want to receive emails in Azure? I did some digging and there isn’t really a well-defined way. The only plausible results I found were setting up a compute role with a third-party SMTP server, or using an external service like Postmark, which cleans up email for you before calling a user-provided webhook. Postmark is nice because you can configure a spam filter before your webhook is called, which you would have to do manually if you were to run your own SMTP server.
Now let’s take a look at Amazon SES. SES has been around for a couple years now (the documentation was released in 2011). You can create a ruleset to chain multiple actions together when an email is trigger. For example, the first action can copy the email to an S3 (Simple Storage Service) bucket, followed by triggering a Lambda function (which is a serverless piece of code) to process the email, and the final action can be to make an SNS (Simple Notification Service) call to send a push notification to a mobile app, all from within AWS.
Amazon can even register your domain name using Amazon Route 53, and you probably should use that as well, because transferring an existing domain is a 7-step hassle. Also, if you registered or transferred your domain recently, ICANN rules prohibit you from transferring again for 60 days. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot by registering a domain name with another registrar within 60 days of using SNS, or you won’t be able to use that domain for receiving email until the prohibition expires.
So if you’re trying to send and receive emails in Windows Azure, you’re pretty much forced to use a third party service, whereas if you’re with Amazon, you can do everything from within AWS.