Whew. Ok, so I think I've got it working. It was a bit harder than I thought. I tried a lot of differnet things. And at long last! So... here's some breadcrumbs that folks might try to follow (This is specifically for making SES work with AWS self-hosted). Ok.... of the things I tried... this is what I did that I think made it work. First, I made sure my project had option email enabled. I created an identity for my email on AWS SES. I registered to get an email for my domain on Google Workspace. (You can choose your preferred email provider, but this is what I chose). I pointed MX and TXT records (and also CNAME in my case for verification) in Route 53 as per Google Workspace instructions. One thing to be careful about: by default, AWS puts new SES accounts in "sandbox mode," where you can only send emails to addresses you've personally verified. So, I thought it wasn't working, but it was just in "Sandbox mode". So, I pre-verified emails that I wanted to send to, and then it worked. And you can test by going to Project > Users > invite new user. It should tell you if AWS SES is working and setup properly or not. Good luck everyone!