Amazon’s cloud empire floated a little higher yesterday with the announcement that the web giant is adding bulk messaging to its cloud services. From the announcement:

We’re excited to announce the beta release of Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), a highly scalable and cost-effective bulk and transactional email-sending service for businesses and developers. Amazon SES eliminates the complexity and expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service. The service integrates with other AWS services, making it easy to send emails from applications being hosted on services such as Amazon EC2. With Amazon SES there is no long-term commitment, minimum spend or negotiation required – businesses can utilize a free usage tier, and after that, enjoy low fees for the number of emails sent plus data transfer.

The horizontal play isn’t particularly surprising. While e-mail is something Amazon has been supporting via EC2 instances, the results aren’t always pretty. The dynamic IPs, for example, often get Amazon-powered e-mail flagged as spam. A dedicated service will help push past these problems, particularly for businesses where e-mail is an important tool but not necessarily the prime competitive advantage, leaving one less thing for your average IT department to puzzle through.

Michael Morisy is the editorial director for ITKnowledgeExchange. He can be followed on Twitter or you can reach him at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.