Amazon SES: A Quick First Look

Amazon Web Services seem to pull out new cards from their collective sleeves almost every single day. This is of course a source of great joy at Cloudreach HQ - in addition to enabling us to provide better value-added services to our clients, the geeks among us like it because it’s yet another toy to have a play with.

Today’s toy is Amazon Simple Email Service (Beta), a highly scalable and cheap bulk email sending service. This came to us at quite an interesting time as we had just built a Postfix email server for one of our clients to send bulk emails from, and having to battle ISPs who were suspicious of our client’s motives.

Amazon SES takes away a large amount of the complexity involved in sending bulk emails; you do not need to build your own email server to be able to send bulk emails.

As SES is still in Beta, you cannot access it from the console. You can however use a bunch of perl scripts they provide you with to get started. The rest of this blogpost describes how this may be done:

1. Sign up for Amazon SES. You can do this by visiting http://aws.amazon.com/ses
2. You will now have access to the Amazon SES developer sandbox using the perl scripts provided. The perl scripts use the Access Key and Secret Access Key for authentication. Copy them into a file as follows, and make sure the file’s permissions are set to 600 (Linux).AWSAccessKeyId=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
   AWSSecretKey=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
   
   See the Getting Started guide here from AWS for details.
3. However, to get the perl scripts working on Ubuntu, you will need to install the following modules:libxml-libxml-perl
   libcrypt-ssleay-perl
   perl-doc
   libxml2-dev
   
4. You will then need to verify your email address and any other email addresses you wish to send emails to (because you’re still sandboxed, you cannot send emails to email addresses you haven’t verified). The developer’s guide has details on how to do this.
5. To send emails to all of your verified email addresses, you can use this simple Python wrapper script I’ve knocked together. You can also download it from our public Amazon S3 bucket by clicking here.

To learn how to execute this file, type python send_email.py -h.

Now that you’re done playing with the SES sandbox, you might want to request Amazon Web Services to grant you production access by filling this form up. AWS indicate most requests will be approved within 24 hours; however, we can’t comment on that just yet because we got our hands on this just a couple of hours ago!!

Siddhu Warrier

www.cloudreach.co.uk