How to send school emails from your own domain in Inkwelly

1. Open the Channels page

Sign in to Inkwelly and open the Communications module from the left sidebar. Click Channels under Setup. The page already shows an Inkwelly Managed Email row marked DEFAULT — this is the built-in notifications@inkwelly.com sender that every Inkwelly school inherits at signup. Connecting your own SES account adds a second email row; Inkwelly will use yours instead the moment it is marked default.

2. Pick Email as the channel

Click Connect channel at the top right. In the picker, pick Email. The first screen explains that branded Inkwelly email is already enabled and points to the Advanced toggle. Click Advanced: connect your own AWS SES account to reveal the SES form. Until this is expanded the page is read-only — there is nothing to misconfigure for schools that simply want to keep using the managed sender.

3. Enter your school's sender identity

In Account name, type a recognisable label such as School email (SES). In From email address, enter the exact address parents will see in their inbox — noreply@yourschool.com or office@yourschool.com. In From domain, optionally enter the domain Inkwelly should set as the Return-Path / bounce domain (for example mg.yourschool.com); leave blank to let SES default it. The From address must be a domain you've already verified in SES — unverified senders are rejected by AWS at send time.

4. Pick your AWS region

In AWS region, accept the default ap-south-1 (Mumbai) unless your SES verification was done in another region. AWS treats each region as a separate SES account, so an us-east-1 verified domain will not work with an ap-south-1 selection here. Most Indian schools are on ap-south-1 for the lowest latency to parent inboxes; international schools running multi-region setups sometimes pick eu-west-1 for EU-resident parents.

5. Enter your IAM access keys

In AWS Access Key ID and AWS Secret Access Key, paste the credentials of an IAM user that has the ses:SendRawEmail permission attached. Inkwelly does not need any other IAM permission — root account keys or admin-level keys are strongly discouraged here. Inkwelly encrypts both values at rest with AES-256-GCM; the secret key becomes write-only after save, so even your own team cannot read it back from the Inkwelly UI.

6. (Optional) Attach a Configuration Set

If you want SES to push delivery, bounce and complaint events back to Inkwelly, type the name of your SES Configuration Set in Configuration Set (for example inkwelly-prod). The Configuration Set must already be created in SES with an SNS destination or EventBridge rule. Schools that skip this still see send and delivery confirmations through Inkwelly's own polling — the Configuration Set only adds Gmail-style bounce categorisation.

7. Save the account and verify

In the Defaults section, toggle Set as default for this channel on — this is what tells Inkwelly to route every outgoing email through your SES account instead of the managed one. Click Connect. Inkwelly calls SES's GetSendQuota API to confirm the credentials, region and sandbox status, then opens the account detail page. Status starts as ACTIVE if the SES check passes; if SES rejects, status is FAILED and the verify panel surfaces the exact AWS error (most often Email address not verified or Account in sandbox).