Does CiviMail SMTP work with Amazon AWS SES?
The thread Lobo is referencing is out of date IMO.  I've set up AWS SES with CiviMail multiple times in multiple configurations.  My personal documentation is here.
I've also successfully set up Postfix locally on a VPS as a smarthost to relay to SES - this is nice because then all e-mail from your VPS (e.g. backup notifications, cron failures, etc.) go through SES.  I don't have good docs for that, unfortunately.
Finally - note that my biggest pitfall with SES wasn't SES itself but EC2 - Amazon severely limits outgoing traffic on SMTP ports from EC2 unless you request they manually lift their throttle!
EDIT: A bunch of us discussed our mailing tool at CiviCon today.  Mandrill seemed very popular, for a number of reasons - like subaccounts and the strength of the CiviCRM integration.  I wasn't the only SES person - but there was a strong argument that if you do, you must relay through Postfix.  If Amazon throttles you, CiviCRM won't retry - Postfix will.  You could lose e-mails.  Also you can lose e-mails when exceeding quota.  So it works - but I may try Mandrill next time!
ANOTHER EDIT: Forget Mandrill, SparkPost is the third-party mailer of choice in Civi-world these days now that Mandrill jacked up the prices.