Just to follow up to this... I've generally had a bad experience with SES so far. It's a real shame too - the pricing is great and it would make it very easy to do bulk email directly from DNN.

I've had a lot of trouble with some security issues in DNN's connection to SES. There seems to be a lot of trouble validating the certificate from SES. This seemed like a common problem and was discussed often in the SES forums, but with little result. At the end of the day, for something like SES, you just want it to work and to not have to think about it... but it was causing all kinds of random problems that were low-level issues in .NET's handling of security certificates.

So, for now, I've just given up on SES. We may still try to use them from some non-DNN based email... but even that's yet to be determined.

Mike