Is it OK to combine several email records (GSuite + Amazon SES)?

Question

Just to be clear, is it ok for me to do this:

• Continue using Gmail (GSuite) for my business domain (email address);
• Also allow Amazon SES to work using the same email (by adding MX, TXT and CNAME) records?

In other words, can I have both and will both work w/out issues?

Thanks

Answer 1

You can do this, with no issues at all. We do this regularly; all our inbound and day-to-day user mail is handled by GSuite, but we send marketing and transactional mails through SES.

When you validate your domain with SES you’ll receive a set of DNS records to insert in to your zonefile. One of those will be an MX record that will look something like

10 inbound-smtp.regionInboundUrl.amazonaws.com

To have GSuite or another provider handle your incoming (and some outgoing) mail, simply do not create that MX record.

The other DNS records (DKIM, SPF etc) are best practice for sending emails as, at a very high level, they prove to the receiving server that the server that is delivering the message to them is authorized by the domain to send mail on its behalf.

From a practical perspective, sending mail from many places isn’t really an issue, but receiving mail at multiple places isn’t really possible.