How to maximize availability through Amazon SAS? DKIM, SPF, sender ID or all of them?

Question

I am working on a digital gift platform that relies on email to go to the inbox. Email is sent through Amazon SAS and is of high quality (recipient name in email, single recipient, personal message, extremely low rejection rate and complaints). However, I still see very mixed results regarding the behavior of the spam filter. Some of them are marked as spam, some of them do not belong to the same Internet providers.

I don't currently have a DKIM, SPF, or Sender ID set ( http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/authentication.html )

Is there a drawback to using all of these elements together, or should I pick and choose?

Answer 1

Your problem seems to be here:

I don’t currently have DKIM, SPF or sender ID

You definitely need SPF records to send AWS emails reliably. Due to its ease of use, EC2 will become spam without SPF. See this SO answer for how to configure SPF for use with EC2. Be sure to fill out this form to ask Amazon to remove the sending limits from your EC2 instance.