finally figured out how to get jenkins to send an ses email. in SMTP, TLS and SSL are not the same thing, and Jenkins only does SSL by default. Unfortunately, AWS requires TLS. :rage1: To enable TLS, we actually have to pass in a java flag, which is in the jenkins sysconfig file, so we're laying down a new one with a template. Once that is set we want to DISABLE SSL for the email configuration, and then email should work. should. :pray: