Which of the two services is appropriate in the following cases? My understanding is that they are not mutually exclusive and SES is used in the background (SMTP) of Workmail, and Workmail is just an email storage and organization service like Outlook.
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For sending mass marketing emails to potential clients repeatedly and not being blacklisted by AWS.
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An employee of the company needs to receive notifications when a client fills out a 'contact us' form on the company's website.
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Employees of a given company need to email each other on their company email addresses.
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SES is not designed for this - SES is primarily for automated sending email, with the facility to receive email and send it to automated systems via Lambda, SNS, or stored on S3. Sending would actually work fine from email clients. The thing that won't work is receiving email, as below - it doesn't store it for collection by IMAP or similar.
You can use Amazon SES to receive messages and deliver them to an Amazon S3 bucket, call your custom code via an AWS Lambda function, or publish notifications to Amazon SNS.
You should consider FastMail and Zoho as well, both are cheaper than the big three and provide a quality service. As Michael points out Amazon Workmail is designed to do what you need, but at a price similar to the big three.
If you can't afford a reliable hosted email service then you're probably going to have to host your own email server. This comes with complications, primarily around spam. You'll have to factor in setup costs, hardware or VPS (an AWS t2 nano or micro would probably be fine), configuration, maintenance, and support. I suspect that unless your company is fairly large the costs will be similar to using a hosted email service.
Amazon Workmail would work but it shares servers with Amazon SES which means you will experience bounces because SES is occasionally blacklisted because people use it to send bulk emails.
