What is Amazon SES?

Amazon Simple Email Service is a leading email platform that has the ability to provide an easy, cost-effective way to send and receive email using your email addresses and domains. It is a fully managed email service that enables users to send and receive email messages. In addition, you can use it to send transactional emails, for instance, order confirmations, shipping notifications, and password reset instructions.

This service can be integrated into any application to send transactional and marketing messages. This helps you deliver information about your product and service to your customers and clients. Also, it helps in customer support and engagement. In addition, larger firms use such a service to automate sending emails.

What are the Benefits of Using Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)?

  1. Pay-as-You-Go
    •  Amazon SES is a pay-as-you-go service, meaning you will have to pay for the number of emails sent and received. However, there are no upfront fees or long-term contracts required.
    • Amazon SES can be used to send emails using the SMTP interface, the Amazon SES API, or a third-party library or package. The cost of sending emails with Amazon SES varies depending on the volume of emails you send, the type of emails you send, and the destination of the emails.
  2. Secure Dedicated IP
    • In AWS SES, you can secure a dedicated IP address and get control over the sender’s reputation for all the different segments of your email transactions.
    • Using a dedicated IP address can help you build and maintain a good sender reputation, as all of the emails sent from that IP address will reflect on your reputation. This can be particularly useful if you send a high volume of emails or if you need to send emails to recipients who are particularly sensitive to spam.
  3. Free Outbound Messages
    • Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) provides 62000 outbound messages for free. However, later, you will have to pay for every 1000 outbound messages. For more details, you can refer to this link pricing. 
    • The cost of sending emails with Amazon SES varies depending on the volume of emails you send, the type of emails you send, and the destination of the emails.

What are the Prerequisites for Using Amazon SES?

  1. The first prerequisite to be considered before a software product engineering company deploys Amazon SES is to make a verified AWS account.
  2. Make sure to complete the verification of your email address with Amazon SES. Before you send an email with Amazon SES, the email address must be verified (senders email address). Verify the recipient’s email address if your account is still in the Amazon SES sandbox.
  3. The users can also use the Amazon SES console to verify their email.

How to Integrate Amazon SES into Your Project?

The Site24x7 AWS is an API-driven service for monitoring crucial cloud resources such as Amazon EC2, RDS instances, and S3 buckets. Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is a cloud-based console for sending and receiving emails. 

 With Site24x7’s AWS integration in Amazon SES, tracking email sending events such as account bounce, complaint, open, click-through rates and more becomes easier.

Now, let’s directly jump into how to setup Amazon SES. The guide will help you learn the steps necessary to integrate SES into our projects.

  1. Add the gem ‘aws-sdk-ses’ in your gemfile and run the command bundle install.
  2. The below-shared platform will help you to understand and follow a format for the template that can be followed –

In the template_data method, all the variables that are needed in the HTML template can be passed. In addition, in our demo implementation of Amazon SES API, we used an HTML template from Stripo. 

In the implementation represented below, customer_first_name, order.pharmacy_name, order.cash_on_delivery are the variables that have been used in the template.

For a deeper understanding, please access the template. You can refer to Amazone Quicksight to access the template.

The screenshot below gives a view into how to add the configurations in your respective method. You can provide your credentials in the function, like how it has been represented in the screenshot below. However, another reliable and secure way would be to define it in secrets.yml. 

The call to SendTemplatedEmail must include all the necessary parameters, like the destination parameter and all variables mentioned in the template. Without either of them, an outbound message wouldn’t reach the destination. 

 Here, the SendTemplatedEmail operation has been covered for you. You can find the other operations in the following link –  https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/APIReference/API_Operations.html.

Conclusion

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) can be a good option for sending transactional emails, such as order confirmations, shipping notifications, and password reset instructions. It is a reliable, scalable, cost-effective email service that allows you to customize your emails and integrate them with other AWS services. However, consider other factors, such as deliverability, features, and pricing, when deciding whether to use Amazon SES for your transactional emails.

If you were planning on using Amazon SES, we hope this blog has helped you learn the integration process of SES into your project. Contact team Tntra for expert guidance on implementing Amazon SES API in your projects.