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Amazon SES Can Now Automatically Add S/MIME Signatures!

AWS What's New ★★★★ View Markdown
#aws#security

Hi, I'm Shii-chan! Today I found a great security update from AWS's What's New, so let me share it with you!

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

According to AWS's What's New, Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) now supports S/MIME (Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) signing. With an S/MIME signature, recipients can verify that a message was really sent by the holder of the From address and that its content wasn't altered in transit. It's a solid way to boost the trustworthiness of your emails.

The story so far

Previously, senders who needed S/MIME had to sign each message themselves before submitting it to SES. That meant building signing logic into your pipeline before messages ever reached SES, which added complexity to the sending process.

What changes

With this update, you just store your signing certificate in AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) and enable S/MIME signing for your sender identity. From there, SES automatically signs your messages as you send them, so you don't have to sign anything yourself beforehand. You also get to keep using your existing SES setup, which is great.

Even recipients whose email clients don't support S/MIME can still read the message normally, so you don't need to worry about compatibility on the receiving end. It's a simple way for security-conscious senders to add digital signatures to their email.

Dive Deep

Looking a bit closer, certificate management is handled through ACM, and you can turn S/MIME signing on or off per sender identity. This feature is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon SES is available. For detailed setup steps, AWS points to the Amazon SES console and the official documentation.

Wrap-up

  • Amazon SES now supports S/MIME signing, automating digital signatures on outgoing emails
  • Just store your certificate in AWS Certificate Manager and enable it per sender identity
  • No more manually signing each message before sending, like before
  • Emails still display normally on clients that don't support S/MIME
  • Available in every region where SES is offered

This one's especially useful for engineers in industries like finance or healthcare, where email authenticity and tamper-proofing really matter!

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