As we continue our AWS tour, this stop is the Simple Email Service. This service is a great tool for adding email to your AWS environment. It is secure and scalable.
Straightforward and Secure Email
Almost every app we build these days requires us to send email notifications somewhere along the way. This may be a registration email, a password change, or some other information. Of course, sending those emails require an account and SMTP setup. Typically we grab a developer email address to start and then move over to an app email later. For example, we will create [email protected] or a similar address to handle the sending and receiving of emails.
The challenge for all of this is that we are either tasked with building an email server or using a provider when we use AWS. We would rather use something inside this infrastructure we use instead of adding another vendor. That is where SES comes into play. It integrates with our environment to make sending emails a matter of an API call.
The Sandbox
One of the great features of SES is that it starts in sandbox mode. In this mode, it will only allow emails to go to confirmed email addresses. This approach is perfect for development and testing. You can use real email addresses for testing, but be assured that they will not spam users. You can limit the acceptable addresses to your developers and testing team so only they will receive emails. This feature alone is worth using since it makes it very difficult to “oops” your way into sending emails to recipients that should not receive them.
Communicate With Confidence
Simple Email Service is not too hard to setup, and it provides some great tutorials. These videos provide best practices as well as steps to get your emails flowing through the Amazon system. The service is built by Amazon for Amazon, so it includes tracking and security that any enterprise email solution needs. We highly recommend testing this out. Setup an account, configure your environment and send out some emails. We will revisit this service in the future with some specific code examples. At that time we will walk through how to use this service for your app’s email needs.
