I found the guide here super helpful for doing a test-run of the SES configs
just copy/paste the script shown there to a new script file, modify the endpoint (e.g. email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com ), and it seems to work just fine. For some reason, the telnet method does not seem to work with SES, not sure why.
oh yea for that guide also I did this too to “make a configuration set”, not sure if it was actually required or not for Discourse but I did it anyway just to be able to test the SES as described in the script Creating configuration sets in SES - Amazon Simple Email Service
here is another thing that tripped me up; Publishing an MX record for Amazon SES email receiving - Amazon Simple Email Service
For the required DNS MX Record to apply to your domain, AWS SES provides the “Value” of the record in a format like this;
10 inbound-smtp.region.amazonaws.com
However, my domain registrar gave me an error that “the Value must be a hostname”, aka it did not like the "10 " that was prefixed in there. The AWS Console did not directly tell you what that meant or what to do with it, so as per the docs linked there, you need to do this for your DNS Registrar;
The management consoles of some DNS providers include separate fields for the record Value and the record Priority. If this is the case for your DNS provider, enter
10for the Priority value, and enter the incoming mail endpoint URL for the Value.
Should look like this in your domain Registrar dashboard;
