Tag Archives: Amazon SES

Leverage IAM Roles for email sending via SES from EC2 and eliminate a common credential risk

2024-09-27 Zip Zieper

Post Syndicated from Zip Zieper original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/leverage-iam-roles-for-email-sending-via-ses-from-ec2-and-eliminate-a-common-credential-risk/

Sending automated transactional emails, such as account verifications and password resets, is a common requirement for web applications hosted on Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon SES provides multiple interfaces for sending emails, including SMTP, API, and the SES console itself. The type of SES credential you use with Amazon SES depends on the method through which you are sending the emails.

In this blog post, we describe how to leverage IAM roles for EC2 instances to securely send emails via the Amazon SES API, without the need to embed IAM credentials directly in the application code, link to a shared credentials file, or manage IAM credentials within the EC2 instance. By adopting the approach outlined in this blog, you can enhance security by eliminating the risk of credential exposure and simplify credential management for your web applications.

Solution Overview

Below we provide step-by-step instructions to configure an IAM role with SES permissions to use on your EC2 instance. This allows the EC2 hosted web application to securely send emails via Amazon SES without storing or managing IAM credentials within the EC2 instance. We present an option for running EC2 and SES in the same AWS account, as well as an option to accommodate running EC2 and SES in different AWS accounts. Both options offer a way to enhance security and simplify credential management.

Either option begins with creating an IAM role with SES permissions. Next, the IAM role is attached to your EC2 instance, providing it with the necessary permissions for SES without needing to embed IAM credentials in your application code or on a file in the EC2 instance. In option 2, we’ll add cross-account permissions that allow the code on the EC2 instance in account “A” to send email via the SES API in account “B”. We also provide a sample Python script that demonstrates how to send an email from your EC2 instance using the attached IAM role.

Option 1 – SES and EC2 are in a single AWS account

In a typical scenario where an EC2 instance is operating in the same AWS account as SES, the process of using an IAM role to send emails via SES is straightforward. In the steps below, you’ll configure and attach an IAM role to the EC2 instance. You’ll then update a sample Python script to use the permissions provided by the attached IAM role to send emails via SES. This direct access simplifies the SES sending process, as no explicit credential management is required in the code, nor do you need to include a shared credentials file on the EC2 instance.

EC2 & SES in the same AWS Account

Prerequisites – single AWS account for EC2 and SES

A single AWS account in a region that supports SES
Verified domain or email identity in Amazon SES.
- Make note of a verified sending email address here: ___________
EC2 instance (Linux) in running state
- If you don’t have a EC2 instance create one (Linux)
Administrative Access to Amazon SES, IAM and EC2 consoles.
Access to a recipient email address to receive test emails from the python script.
- Make note of a SES verified recipient email address to send test emails here: ___________

Step 1 – Create IAM Role for EC2 instance with SES Permissions

To start, create an IAM role that grants the necessary permissions to send emails using Amazon SES by following these steps:

Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the IAM console.
In the navigation pane, choose “Roles,” and then choose “Create role.”
Choose the trusted entity type as “AWS service” and select “EC2” as the service that will use this role, then click ‘Next’
Search for and select the “AmazonSESFullAccess” policy from the list (or create a custom policy with the necessary SES permissions), then click ‘Next’.

Provide a name for your role (e.g., EC2_SES_SendEmail_Role).
Click “Create role“.

Step 2 – Attach the IAM Role to EC2 instance.

Next, attach the IAM role to your EC2 instance:

Open the EC2 Management Console.
In the navigation pane, choose “Instances,” and select the running EC2 instance to which you want to attach the IAM role.
With the instance selected, choose “Actions,” then “Security,” and “Modify IAM role.“
Choose the IAM role you created (EC2_SES_SendEmail_Role) from the drop-down menu and click “Update IAM role.”

Step 3 – Create a sample python script that sends emails from the EC2 instance with the attached role.

Now that your EC2 instance is configured with the necessary permissions, you can set up an example Python script to send emails via Amazon SES using the IAM Role. Here, we’re using the AWS SDK for Python (Boto3), a powerful and versatile library to interact with the SES API endpoint. Before running the example script, ensure that Python, pip (the package installer for Python), and the Boto3 library are installed on your EC2 instance:
- Run the ‘python3 –version‘ command to check if Python is installed on your EC2 instance. If Python is installed, the version will be displayed, otherwise you’ll receive a ‘command not found’ or similar error message.
  - If python is not installed, run the command ‘sudo yum install python3 -y‘
- Run the ‘pip3 --version‘ command to check if pip is installed on your EC2 instance. If pip3 is installed, is installed, the version will be displayed, otherwise you’ll receive a ‘command not found’ or similar error message.
  - If pip3 is not installed, run the command ‘sudo yum install python3-pip‘
- Install the Boto3 Library which allows Python scripts to interact with AWS services including SES. Run the command ‘pip3 install boto3‘ to install (or update) Boto3 using pip.
Save the code below as a Python file named ‘sesemail.py‘ on your EC2 instance.
Edit 'sesemail.py‘ and replace the placeholder values of SENDER, RECIPIENT, and AWS_REGION with your values (see prerequisites). Do not modify any “” marks.

[copy]

import boto3
from botocore.exceptions import ClientError

SENDER = "[email protected]"
RECIPIENT = "[email protected]"
#CONFIGURATION_SET = "ConfigSet"
AWS_REGION = "us-west-2"
SUBJECT = "Amazon SES Test Email (SDK for Python) using IAM Role"
BODY_TEXT = ("Amazon SES Test (Python)\r\n"
             "This email was sent with Amazon SES using the "
             "AWS SDK for Python (Boto)."
            )
            
BODY_HTML = """<html>
<head></head>
<body>
  <h1>Amazon SES Test (SDK for Python) using IAM Role</h1>
  <p>This email was sent with
    <a href='https://aws.amazon.com/ses/'>Amazon SES</a> using the
    <a href='https://aws.amazon.com/sdk-for-python/'>
      AWS SDK for Python (Boto)</a>.</p>
</body>
</html>
            """            

CHARSET = "UTF-8"

client = boto3.client('ses',region_name=AWS_REGION)

try:
    response = client.send_email(
        Destination={
            'ToAddresses': [
                RECIPIENT,
            ],
        },
        Message={
            'Body': {
                'Html': {
                    'Charset': CHARSET,
                    'Data': BODY_HTML,
                },
                'Text': {
                    'Charset': CHARSET,
                    'Data': BODY_TEXT,
                },
            },
            'Subject': {
                'Charset': CHARSET,
                'Data': SUBJECT,
            },
        },
        Source=SENDER,
    )   
except ClientError as e:
    print(e.response['Error']['Message'])
else:
    print("Email sent! Message ID:"),
    print(response['MessageId'])

Run ‘python3 sesmail.py‘ to execute the Python script.
When ‘python3 sesmail.py‘ runs successfully, an email is sent to the RECIPIENT(check the inbox), and the command line will display the sent Message ID.

Option 2 – SES and EC2 are in different AWS accounts

In some scenarios, your EC2 instance might operate in a different AWS account than SES. Let’s call the EC2 AWS account “A” and SES AWS account “B”. Because the AWS resources in account A don’t automatically have permission to access AWS resources account B, we need some way to allow the code on EC2 to assume a role in the SES Account using the AWS Security Token Service (STS). This involves a method that generates temporary credentials that include an access key, secret access key, and session token, which are only valid for a limited time.

EC2 & SES in different AWS Accounts

In the steps below, you’ll configure and attach an IAM role to the EC2 instance in account “A” such that it can run an example Python script. This Python script can use the permissions provided by the attached IAM role to send emails via SES in account “B”. This approach leverages cross-account access and simplifies sending email from the EC2 in account A via SES in account B. As with Option 1, no explicit credential management is required in the code running on EC2, nor do you need to include a shared credentials file on the Ec2 instance.

Prerequisites – different AWS accounts for EC2 and SES (use cross-account access)

An AWS account “A” with:
- EC2 instance (Linux) in running state. (If you don’t have a EC2 instance, create one using Amazon Linux)
- Administrative Access to Amazon IAM and EC2 consoles.
- Make note of your “A” AWS account ID here: ________________
An AWS account “B” with:
- Verified domain (or email identity for testing only) in Amazon SES
  - Make note of a verified sending email address here: ___________
- Administrative Access to Amazon SES and IAM consoles.
  - Make note of your “B” AWS account ID here: ________________
- In the steps below, you will create a “SES_Role_for_account_A” role.
  - Make note of the ARN of the “SES_Role_for_account_A” role here: ___________
- Access to a recipient email address to receive test emails from the python script.
  - Make note of a SES verified recipient email address to send test emails here: ___________

Step 1 – Create IAM Role in the SES “B” account

Sign in to the SES “B” account via the AWS Management Console and open the IAM console.
In the navigation pane, choose “Roles,” and then choose “Create role“.
Choose the trusted entity type as ‘AWS account’ and select ‘Another AWS account’.
Add the AWS account ID where your EC2 instance resides (AWS account “A” in the prerequisites) and click ‘Next’.
Search for and select the “AmazonSESFullAccess” policy or create a custom policy with the necessary SES permissions, then click ‘Next’.
Provide a name for your role (e.g., ‘SES_Role_for_account_A').
Click “Create role“.
Copy the arn for the new SES_Role_for_account_A (you’ll need the arn in the next step).

Step 2 – Create a IAM policy in the EC2 “A” account that allows this role to assume the SES_Role_for_account_A role you just created in the SES “B” Account.

Sign in to the EC2 “A” account via the AWS Management Console and open the IAM console.
In the navigation pane, choose “Policies,” and then choose “Create Policy”.
Choose the service as ‘EC2’ and select policy editor as JSON.
Copy the policy below, and in the policy editor, replace the Resource with the arn of theSES_Role_for_account_A in the SES account “B” (you created this in step 1).

[copy, paste into policy editor & replace the arn with SES_Role_for_account_A]

{
"Version": "2012-10-17",
"Statement": [
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": "sts:AssumeRole",
"Resource": "arn:aws:iam::<SES_Account_ID>:role/<Role_Name>"
}
]
}

Click ‘Next’ and provide a name for your role (e.g., EC2_Policy_for_account_B).
Click ‘Create the Policy’

Step 3 – Create an IAM role in the EC2 “A” account, and attach the previously created IAM policy (`EC2_Policy_for_account_B`) to it.

In the EC2 “A” account IAM console navigation pane, choose “Roles,” and then choose “Create role.”
Choose the trusted entity type as “AWS service” and select “EC2” as the service, then click ‘Next’.

Filter by type “customer managed”, search for (EC2_Policy_for_account_B) and select that policy and ‘Next’ (note – if you are using AWS Session Manger to remotely connect to your EC2 instance, you may need to add the “AmazonSSMManagedInstanceCore” policy to the role).

Provide a name for your role (e.g., EC2_SES_in_account_B_role).
Click “Create role“.

Step 4 – Attach the IAM Role (`EC2_SES_in_account_B_role`) to the EC2 instance in AWS account “A”.

Open the EC2 Management Console in AWS account “A”
In the navigation pane, choose “Instances,” and select the instance to which you want to attach the EC2_SES_in_account_B_role IAM role.
With the instance selected, choose “Actions,” then “Security,” and “Modify IAM role.”

Choose the IAM role you created (EC2_SES_in_account_B_role) from the drop-down menu.
Click “Update IAM role.”

Step 5 – Create a sample python script that sends emails via SES in AWS account “B” from the EC2 instance in AWS account “A” using the EC2 attached role.

Now that your EC2 instance is configured with the necessary permissions, you can set up an example Python script to send emails via Amazon SES in AWS Account “B” using the IAM Role on EC2 in AWS Account “A”. We’ll use the AWS SDK for Python (Boto3), a powerful and versatile library to interact with the SES API endpoint. Before running the example script, ensure that Python, pip (the package installer for Python), and the Boto3 library are installed on your EC2 instance:

- Run the ‘python3 –version‘ command to check if Python is installed on your EC2 instance. If Python is installed, the version will be displayed, otherwise you’ll receive a ‘command not found’ or similar error message.
  - If python is not installed, run the command ‘sudo yum install python3 -y‘
- Run the ‘pip3 --version‘ command to check if pip is installed on your EC2 instance. If pip3 is installed, is installed, the version will be displayed, otherwise you’ll receive a ‘command not found’ or similar error message.
  - If pip3 is not installed, run the command ‘sudo yum install python3-pip‘
- Install the Boto3 Library which allows Python scripts to interact with AWS services including SES. Run the command ‘pip3 install boto3‘ to install (or update) Boto3 using pip.

Save the code below as a Python file named cross_sesemail.py on your EC2 instance.
4b. Edit cross_sesemail.py and replace the placeholder values of the ROLE_ARN with ARN of the SES_Role_for_account_A you created in SES Account “B” (see prerequisites), SENDER, RECIPIENT, and AWS_REGION with your values (see prerequisites). Do not modify any “” marks.

[copy, edit & replace the ROLE_ARN]

import boto3
from botocore.exceptions import ClientError

# Replace with your role ARN in SES Account
ROLE_ARN = "arn:aws:iam::<Account_ID>:role/<Role_Name>"

# Create an STS client
sts_client = boto3.client('sts')

# Assume the role
assumed_role = sts_client.assume_role(
    RoleArn=ROLE_ARN,
    RoleSessionName="SESSession"
)

# Extract the temporary credentials
credentials = assumed_role['Credentials']

# Create an SES client using the assumed role credentials
ses_client = boto3.client(
    'ses',
    region_name='us-west-2',
    aws_access_key_id=credentials['AccessKeyId'],
    aws_secret_access_key=credentials['SecretAccessKey'],
    aws_session_token=credentials['SessionToken']
)

# Email parameters
SENDER = "[email protected]"
RECIPIENT = "[email protected]"
SUBJECT = "Amazon SES Test (SDK for Python) using cross-account IAM Role"
BODY_TEXT = ("Amazon SES Test (Python)\r\n"
             "This email was sent with Amazon SES using the "
             "AWS SDK for Python (Boto) using IAM Role."
            )
BODY_HTML = """<html>
<head></head>
<body>
  <h1>Amazon SES Test (SDK for Python) using IAM Role</h1>
  <p>This email was sent with
    <a href='https://aws.amazon.com/ses/'>Amazon SES</a> using the
    <a href='https://aws.amazon.com/sdk-for-python/'>
      AWS SDK for Python (Boto)</a> using IAM Role.</p>
</body>
</html>
            """
CHARSET = "UTF-8"

# Send the email
try:
    response = ses_client.send_email(
        Destination={
            'ToAddresses': [RECIPIENT],
        },
        Message={
            'Body': {
                'Html': {
                    'Charset': CHARSET,
                    'Data': BODY_HTML,
                },
                'Text': {
                    'Charset': CHARSET,
                    'Data': BODY_TEXT,
                },
            },
            'Subject': {
                'Charset': CHARSET,
                'Data': SUBJECT,
            },
        },
        Source=SENDER,
    )
except ClientError as e:
    print(e.response['Error']['Message'])
else:
    print("Email sent! Message ID:"),
    print(response['MessageId'])

Run the python script python3 cross_sesemail.py. When the email is sent successfully, the command line output will display the message ID of the sent email, and the recipient will receive an email.

Conclusion:

By implementing IAM roles for EC2 instances with SES permissions, you can securely send emails via the SES APIs from your web applications without the need to store or manage IAM credentials within the EC2 instance or application code. This approach not only enhances security by eliminating the risk of credential exposure, but also simplifies the management of credentials. With the step-by-step guide provided in this blog post, you can easily configure IAM roles for your EC2 instances and start sending emails via the Amazon SES API in a secure and efficient manner, regardless of whether your EC2 and SES resources reside in the same or different AWS accounts.

Next Steps:

Sign up for the AWS Free Tier and try out Amazon SES with IAM roles for EC2 instances as demonstrated in this blog post.
Consult the AWS documentation on IAM Roles for Amazon EC2 and Amazon SES for more detailed instructions and best practices.
Join the AWS Community Forums to ask questions, share experiences, and learn from other AWS users who have implemented similar solutions for secure email sending from their web applications.

About the Authors

Manas Murali M

Manas Murali M is a Cloud Support Engineer II at AWS and subject matter expert in Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) and Amazon CloudFront. With over 5 years of experience in the IT industry, he is passionate about resolving technical issues for customers. In his free time, he enjoys spending time with friends, traveling, and exploring emerging technologies.

Zip

Zip is an Amazon Pinpoint and Amazon Simple Email Service Sr. Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS. Outside of work he enjoys time with his family, cooking, mountain biking and plogging.

Email Journaling with SES Mail Manager

2024-08-15 Zip Zieper

Post Syndicated from Zip Zieper original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/email-journaling-with-ses-mail-manager/

Introduction to Journaling

Email journaling is the practice of preserving comprehensive records of all email communications within an organization. This approach stems from the need to maintain rigid, compliance-driven retention policies focused on auditing an entire organization’s email activities. Because journaled email messages are often required to satisfy on-demand audit and investigation requests, they must be readily searchable, making accessibility a key requirement. Reflecting legal and regulatory requirements, email journaling has historically required expensive, dedicated off-site storage and complex retrieval systems.

Amazon WorkMail is a managed business email service with flexible journaling capabilities that are configurable at both the individual mailbox and organization-wide level. With WorkMail, you can use custom rules to selectively preserve or redirect certain messages using granular journaling controls. This flexibility allows administrators to implement both traditional email journaling and configurations that you can customize to meet specific use cases.

Email journaling is used to capture and retain every email sent to and from an organization, primarily for compliance purposes. In contrast, email archiving is typically used to offload and store emails from an organization’s primary email system, often driven by inbox size limits and data backup or eDiscovery needs. While journaling focuses on preserving a consolidated record of communications separate from live mailboxes, archiving is a more selective process. Journaling is usually driven by regulatory, audit, and compliance requirements. As discussed in this blog post, you can use the Mail Manager archiving feature not only for selective email backup and optimization, but also to fulfill your email journaling requirements. You can learn more about email archiving with Mail Manager in this blog post.

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) Mail Manager provides comprehensive tools that simplify managing large volumes of email communications within an organization. Mail Manager has a built-in archiving function which can be used as an inexpensive journaling solution for email systems like Amazon WorkMail. Mail Manager’s rules engine allows for the creation of rules that readily satisfy a wide range of email journaling requirements. Additionally, Mail Manager’s archiving capability supports multiple, concurrent archiving destinations that can be independently searched and exported on demand.

In this blog post, we discuss how Amazon WorkMail and Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) Mail Manager make email journaling easier to set up and use, more cost-effective and versatile. We’ll walk the reader through setting up email journaling for an Amazon WorkMail organization that uses SES Mail Manager’s routing, processing, and archiving features.

SES Mail Manager as Journaling Destination for WorkMail

For our purposes, we’ll assume you’ve already set up WorkMail as your mailbox provider, but the process described below will work with the journaling features of most 3rd party email solutions. If you want to explore Amazon WorkMail, visit the getting started documentation here.

In the following sections, we’ll describe how to configure WorkMail journaling to send full email journals to SES Mail Manager’s archives. We’ll define different retention periods for each archive to demonstrate how this solution can be used to meet both short and long-term retention requirements. Finally, we’ll use the AWS SES Mail Manager console to search, export, and manage the email journals and archives.

In our examples, we’ll use Amazon Route 53 to create a new domain called ‘journaling.solutions’ which we’ll configure to send all ‘@journaling.solutions’ emails to an SES Mail Manager Ingest endpoint. To begin, open the AWS Console, navigate to your WorkMail Organization’s settings, and click on the Journaling tab:

Organization settings Journaling tab

Click Edit, enable journaling, and provide a journaling email address (we’re using ‘[email protected]’) to receive journaled content. Provide a report email address, such as the admin email list, to receive journaling reports:

Provide a Journaling email address

Open the AWS SES console in a new browser window, and navigate to Mail Manager’s Rule sets. Create a new rule set called ‘journaling-rule-demo’. Click Edit and create a new rule called “journal-all”, with an Archive action. Click the create an archive button and create an archive called ‘journaling-archive-demo’:

Create a new Rule Set called ‘Journaling-rule-demo’

When creating Mail Manager archives, you have options to set the retention period from 3 months to permanent storage. You can also choose to encrypt your archived messages with your own KMS key. The configuration in our example is for permanent storage and shows the optional text field for using your own KMS key:

you can encrypt the archived messages with your own KMS key

Traditional journaling calls for recording every email message to the journal, so for our ‘journal-all’ rule, we will not define filtering behaviors in the rule set. This will instruct Mail manager to send all emails for [email protected] to the journaling-archive-demo archive. It is worth noting that Mail Manager’s rule set can be configured to filter and independently process multiple recipient addresses. Consult the documentation to learn about other ways to customize Mail Manager for your use cases.

Next, create a new traffic policy, called journaling-traffic-demo, and configure it to reject any message not explicitly sent to the journaling destination address ([email protected]):

Create a new Traffic policy, called ‘Journaling-traffic-demo’

Create an open ingress endpoint called ‘journaling-demo-IG’, and select the ‘journaling-traffic-demo’ traffic policy and ‘journaling-rule-demo’ rule set:

Create an Open Ingress endpoint called ‘Journaling-demo-IG’,

After you press the create Ingest endpoint button, Mail Manager will create an Ingress endpoint and assign it a DNS A Record to be used in your DNS configurations to route email to Mail Manager:

Mail Manager Ingress endpoint DNS A Record to be used in your DNS configurations

From the General details page of the Ingress endpoint, copy the Ingress endpoint’s DNS A Record to your clipboard. Open a new browser window to your DNS provider’s MX configuration page (in our example below, we’re using AWS Route53). Edit the MX record for ‘journaling.solutions’ by pasting the Ingress endpoint A record. This configuration will route email sent to any address ‘@journaling.solutions’ to the Mail Manager’s Ingress endpoint for processing by the Traffic policy and Rule set:

Using AWS Route53 to edit MX record for ‘journaling.solutions’ to Ingress endpoint A record

To test your new journaling configuration, send several emails to several email addresses in your WorkMail organization (or the alternative inbox provider you configured in the first step). WorkMail (or your alternative inbox provider) will send a full record of all emails to the journaling destination address ([email protected]).

Wait a few minutes after sending the emails above, then open the AWS Mail Manager console’s archiving controls and search for messages sent in the last 12 hours:

AWS Mail Manager console’s archiving controls

The example above shows a search for all messages received in the “last 12 hours”, with no other filters specified. The results show every message inserted into the archive in this timeframe. You’ll see one entry where the from address is different (from toby@tegwj@…). This is an example of mail that was sent directly to the journaling destination address ([email protected]). This works because our traffic policy and rule set configurations don’t include any filters.

A cost effective solution at scale

Using Mail Manager as a journaling solution gives you more direct control over your costs than typical journaling services. While most journaling services in the market today charge a fixed rate per journaled mailbox, Mail Manager pricing is comprised of a monthly fixed fee per ingestion endpoint and consumption pricing for basic message handling, and the amount of data archived.

For example, imagine your organization has 250 mailboxes, each handling 50 messages per day. On a monthly basis this amounts to 375,000 messages. If we assume each message is 40 kilobytes in size, your organization is generating roughly 15 gigabytes of email per month. As you can see from the table below, the total cost in month 1 is about $140, or $0.56/mailbox.

|Item |Unit Price |Volume |Subtotal/Mo |
|— |— |— |— |
|Ingress Endpoint |$50/mo |1 |$50 |
|Core message processing |$0.15/1000 msgs |375 |$56.25 |
|Archive insertion/indexing |$2/GB (one-time) |15 |$30 |
|Archive storage |$0.19/GB/mo |15 |$2.85 |
|Subtotal: | | |$139.10 |
| |Monthly price per mailbox |$0.56 |

If the proposed email rate in our assumptions stays constant, the Mail Manager archive will grow by 15 gigabytes each month. After 36 months, the total monthly storage cost increases to $102.60. This results in a total monthly spend in month 36 of $238.85, or $0.96/mailbox/month.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we’ve explored how Amazon WorkMail and Amazon SES Mail Manager can provide a cost-effective and accessible solution for email journaling. By leveraging the flexible journaling capabilities of WorkMail and the archiving features of SES Mail Manager, organizations can easily satisfy rigorous compliance requirements around email retention and accessibility.

The combination of WorkMail’s journaling controls and SES Mail Manager’s rule-based archiving allows you to tailor your journaling solution to your specific needs. Whether you require short-term retention for audits or long-term preservation for legal and regulatory purposes, SES Mail Manager’s flexible archiving options have you covered with predictable and transparent costs that scale with your organization’s email volume.

If you’re looking for a modern, scalable, and cost-effective solution for your email journaling needs, we encourage you to explore the capabilities of Amazon SES Mail Manager. Get started today by visiting the AWS documentation and begin streamlining your email compliance and retention processes.

About the Authors

Toby Weir-Jones

Toby is a Principal Product Manager for Amazon SES and WorkMail. He joined AWS in January 2021 and has significant experience in both business and consumer information security products and services. His focus on email solutions at SES is all about tackling a product that everyone uses and finding ways to bring innovation and improved performance to one of the most ubiquitous IT tools.

Zip

Zip is a Sr. Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS, working with Amazon Pinpoint and Simple Email Service and WorkMail. Outside of work he enjoys time with his family, cooking, mountain biking, boating, learning and beach plogging.

Andy Wong

Andy Wong is a Sr. Product Manager with the Amazon WorkMail team. He has 10 years of diverse experience in supporting enterprise customers and scaling start-up companies across different industries. Andy’s favorite activities outside of technology are soccer, tennis and free-diving.

Bruno Giorgini

Bruno Giorgini is a Senior Solutions Architect specializing in Pinpoint and SES. With over two decades of experience in the IT industry, Bruno has been dedicated to assisting customers of all sizes in achieving their objectives. When he is not crafting innovative solutions for clients, Bruno enjoys spending quality time with his wife and son, exploring the scenic hiking trails around the SF Bay Area.

Understanding Google Postmaster Tools (spam complaints) for Amazon SES email senders

2024-07-20 Bruno Giorgini

Post Syndicated from Bruno Giorgini original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/understanding-google-postmaster-tools-spam-complaints-for-amazon-ses-email-senders/

Introduction

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) includes a robust set of built-in tools, such as the Virtual Deliverability Manager (VDM), to help senders ensure optimal email deliverability. Additionally, deliverability data from email service providers like Postmaster Tools by Google can provide invaluable insights for all sending domain owners, including those using SES for bulk or transactional email. Postmaster Tools offers detailed metrics on factors like delivery errors, spam rates, domain reputation, and recipient feedback for Gmail-hosted inboxes. Combining this external data with SES email sending events is critical for maintaining a healthy sender reputation. By leveraging both SES-native tools and resources like Postmaster Tools, senders can identify and address deliverability issues, ensuring their SES-powered emails reach intended recipients across providers.

Many, but not all, mailbox providers will send recipient feedback in the form of “complaints” that can each be attributed directly to the message that the recipient found to be objectionable. These complaints are available in the SES email sending event type “Complaint”. Gmail does not send spam complaint events because their priority is to protect the privacy of their users from the tracking techniques employed by spammers and data brokers. Gmail requires bulk senders to adopt “easy unsubscribe” mechanisms to reduce the need for their users to report messages as spam, and they will show spam complaint metrics in Postmaster Tools. This blog will show you how to maximize value in the spam complaint metric provided by Postmaster Tools.

Amazon SES now supports custom values in the Feedback-ID header in messages sent through SES. This feature provides additional details to help customers identify deliverability trends. Together with Postmaster Tools, customers can group complaints by identifiers of their choice, such as sender business unit or campaign ID. This makes it easier to track deliverability performance associated with independent workloads and campaigns, and accelerates troubleshooting when diagnosing complaint rates.

This image describes the flow for spam complaints to the email sender

Figure 1: Email Feedback Loop

This blog will guide you through implementing and using Feedback Loops within Postmaster Tools to identify email campaigns receiving high complaint volumes from Gmail users. It covers the history and background of feedback loops, the specific requirements for implementing them with Postmaster Tools, and practical examples using AWS CLI and Boto3 to send SES emails with the necessary Feedback-ID header. By the end, you’ll understand how to effectively set up and use Postmaster Tools to monitor and improve your SES email deliverability.

History and Background of FBLs

Traditional Feedback Loops (herein “FBLs”) have been a cornerstone of email deliverability for many years. Initially developed by Internet Service Providers (ISPs), FBLs serve as a mechanism for recipients to report spam complaints to the sender. This feedback is crucial for email service providers and senders to identify problematic email campaigns, take corrective actions, and maintain a healthy sender reputation.

FBLs operate by allowing recipients to mark emails as spam, which then sends a report to the sender’s email service provider. This report typically includes details about the email that triggered the complaint, enabling the sender to investigate and address any issues. By analyzing these reports, senders can refine their email lists, improve content, and ensure that their emails comply with best practices and regulatory requirements. Senders who receive a higher volume of spam complaints are more likely to be blocked or have their emails routed to the spam folder. While high spam complaints are not the sole reason for deliverability issues, they are often the underlying cause.

Postmaster Tools by Gmail is not a traditional FBL. Postmaster Tools will show complaint feedback metrics, but the complaints are not attributable to any individual recipient.

Requirements for using Postmaster Tools FBL with SES

The FBL helps identify campaigns with high complaint rates from Gmail users, specifically useful for email service providers to detect potential abuse of their services.

Note: Data in Postmaster Tools only applies to messages sent to personal Gmail accounts. A personal Gmail account is an account that ends in @gmail.comor @googlemail.com.

Implementation of FBL:
- Feedback-ID Header: SES embeds a header called Feedback-ID containing parameters (Identifiers) uniquely identifying the account and SenderID (AmazonSES)
- Header Format: The Feedback-ID header consists of four parameters, separated by colons:
  a:b:c:SenderIdWhere:

- - SenderId is a mandatory parameter that uniquely identifies the sender.
  - In the case of Amazon SES (Simple Email Service), the SenderId is always “AmazonSES” and cannot be overridden.

Header Parameter	Description
a	First parameter in the Feedback-ID header. SES users can customize through `ses:feedback-id-a` EmailTag
b	Second parameter in the Feedback-ID header. SES users can customize through `ses:feedback-id-b` EmailTag.
c	Third parameter in the Feedback-ID header. SES uses this to identify the sender account
SenderID	Fourth parameter in the Feedback-ID header. Mandatory parameter that uniquely identifies the sender. For Amazon SES, this is always “AmazonSES” and cannot be overridden.

Sender Data Handling:
- DKIM signing by a sender-owned domain is required to prevent spoofing.
  - Proper DKIM alignment is essential for showing Spam Rate and Feedback Loop data in the Postmaster Tools dashboard. Check our blog for recommendations choosing the right domain for optimal deliverability with SES.
- The domain must be added and verified in Postmaster Tools.
- Complaint data is aggregated by distinct values on each of the 4 fields of Feedback-ID.
Feedback-ID header Requirements:
- When sending emails through Amazon SES, users are limited to a single verified header value per traffic stream.
  - This means that the Feedback-ID header cannot contain an individualized value for each destination email address.
  - Instead, the Feedback-ID header needs to contain an identifier that can be used to match a larger campaign or batch of emails, rather than a unique value per recipient.
  - This constraint helps maintain a consistent sender reputation, improves deliverability monitoring and troubleshooting within tools like Postmaster Tools. The Feedback-ID acts as a grouping mechanism, rather than a per-message identifier
- Identifiers must be unique and non-repetitive across fields.
Feedback-ID Example:
- CampaignIDX:CustomerID2:1.us-west-2.TDQeKqHkSNfQztk25wIeVIGTuNmGDud4r1l7dUlxOio=:AmazonSES
  - Each Identifier is used to report spam percentages independently if unusual rates occur.
  - Amazon SES lets customers set the part a and part b of the Feedback-ID header using the EmailTag ses:feedback-id-a and ses:feedback-id-b
  - Amazon SES will combine these tags into a single Feedback-ID header with the format: Feedback-ID=a:b:region.accountId:AmazonSES

The next steps will cover what’s needed to leverage FBLs with SES.

Step 1 – Add Your Domain(s) To Google’s Postmaster Tools

In order to verify with Postmaster Tools that you’re authorized to track the feedback from your domain, you first need to register your ownership of the domain with Postmaster Tools by visiting https://gmail.com/postmaster/.

Verify a new domain with Google Postmaster Tools

Figure 2: Step 1 to verify a domain in Google Postmaster Tools

After entering in your domain, you’d be prompted to add a TXT record into your DNS configuration.

Figure 3: Step 2 to verify a domain in Google Postmaster Tools

Update your sending domain(s) DNS records accordingly.
- The example below specifies how to create the TXT record in Route53. If you’re using another DNS service provider, please refer to their documentation.

Figure 4: Create a new record in Route53

- Navigate to the Route53 Console and click on Hosted zones , specify the hosted zone that contains the domain you want to verify and then Create record.

This image describe the creation of a TXT record including the value provided by Google Postmaster to verify the domain

Figure 5: Add a TXT record with the provided value for verification

- Following the screenshot, create a TXT record type and paste the value assigned by Google for verification in step 2 here.
Go to Postmaster Tools and click on Verify. After successful verification of your domain in Postmaster Tools, you should see the Status column changed from Not Verified to Verified. You can verify your compliance status with the requirements in the Dashboard (2) link.

In this picture we show an example of how the domain would appear once verified in Google Postmaster Tools

Figure 6: Domain verified

Follow the recommendations provided in the Postmaster Tools dashboard to fully comply with the requirements (example below):

Figure 7: Email sender requirements compliance status recommendations

Once you have completed all the verification and configuration steps, you should see compliant checkmarks next to all available requirements (see example below):

Figure 8: Email sender requirements compliant status

Step 2 – Add Feedback-ID headers to your SES emails

Use this command line to send an email with Feedback-ID using the AWS CLI:

aws sesv2 send-email --from-email-address [email protected] \
   --destination '{"ToAddresses":["[email protected]"]}' \
   --content '{"Simple":{"Subject":{"Data":"Test Subject","Charset":"UTF-8"},"Body":{"Text":{"Data":"Test Data","Charset":"UTF-8"}}}}' \
   --email-tags '[{"Name": "ses:feedback-id-a","Value":"feedback-id-part-a-value"}]'

The values of ses:feedback-id-a and ses:feedback-id-b are specified using the --email-tags option.

Alternatively, use Boto3 to send an email with Feedback-ID with the following Python script:

import boto3
from botocore.exceptions import ClientError

def send_email(region_name):
    # Create a new SES client
    ses = boto3.client('sesv2', region_name=region_name)

    # Replace sender and recipient values
    SENDER = "Sender Name <[email protected]>"
    RECIPIENT = "[email protected]"
    CONFIGURATION_SET = "SES_Config_Set"
    SUBJECT = "Amazon SES Test (SDK for Python)"
    BODY_TEXT = "Amazon SES Test (Python)\r\nThis email was sent with Amazon SES using the AWS SDK for Python (Boto)."
    BODY_HTML = """<html>
    <head></head>
    <body>
      <h1>Amazon SES Test (SDK for Python)</h1>
      <p>This email was sent with
        <a href='https://aws.amazon.com/ses/'>Amazon SES</a> using the
        <a href='https://aws.amazon.com/sdk-for-python/'>
          AWS SDK for Python (Boto)</a>.</p>
    </body>
    </html>"""
    CHARSET = "UTF-8"

    try:
        # Send email
        response = ses.send_email(
            FromEmailAddress=SENDER,
            Destination={'ToAddresses': [RECIPIENT]},
            ConfigurationSetName=CONFIGURATION_SET,
            Content={
                "Simple": {
                    "Subject": {
                        "Charset": CHARSET,
                        "Data": SUBJECT
                    },
                    "Body": {
                        "Text": {
                            "Charset": CHARSET,
                            "Data": BODY_TEXT
                        },
                        "Html": {
                            "Charset": CHARSET,
                            "Data": BODY_HTML
                        }
                    },
                    "Headers": [
                        {
                            "Name": "List-Unsubscribe",
                            "Value": "<https://unsubscribe.example.email/[email protected]&topic=topic1>"
                        },
                        {
                            "Name": "List-Unsubscribe-Post",
                            "Value": "One-Click"
                        }
                    ]
                }
            },
            EmailTags=[
                {
                    'Name': 'ses:feedback-id-a',
                    'Value': 'campaign1'
                },
                {
                    'Name': 'ses:feedback-id-b',
                    'Value': 'line-of-business'
                }
            ] #the ses:feedback-id-a and ses:feedback-id-b are specified as a list using EmailTags
        )
        print("Email sent! Response:", response)
        print("Message ID:", response['MessageId'])

    except ClientError as e:
        print(e.response['Error']['Message'])

# Call the function to send the email
send_email(region_name='us-west-2')  # Specify the region here

Step 3 – Viewing FBL results in Postmaster Tools

In order to see any results in the Postmaster Tool dashboard (see examples below), you must send a substantial daily volume of email through the domain(s) you’ve registered. If you see the message “No Data to Display”, your reputation may already be too low, more likely the volume of email traffic sent since you configured the Postmaster tool is insufficient (return to the dashboard in later, after you’ve sent 1,000s of emails).

Figure 9: Feedback loop example image

The image shows a section of the Postmaster Tools dashboard, specifically the Feedback Loop section. This dashboard provides insights into the spam complaint rates and the number of feedback loop identifiers flagged across a given time period, in this case, the last 120 days.

Conclusion

High-volume email senders should look to the combination of Amazon SES’ powerful framework for monitoring in concert with Postmaster Tools to improve and ensure email deliverability. Implementing the Feedback-ID header in your SES emails can significantly enhance your ability to track and troubleshoot deliverability issues. Use Postmaster Tools and the Feedback Loop via Feedback-ID headers in SES emails to gain detailed insights into complaint rates and other key metrics, enabling you to maintain a healthy sender reputation and ensure their emails reach the intended recipients.

Call to Action:

Set Up Postmaster Tools for your sending domain(s)
Verify Your Domain: Register and verify your domain with Postmaster Tools to access valuable insights and track your compliance status.
Set Up Feedback-ID: Start embedding the Feedback-ID header in your emails sent via Amazon SES to take advantage of detailed complaint data and improve your email campaigns.
Monitor and Adjust: Regularly check the Postmaster Tools dashboard to monitor your spam rates and feedback loop identifiers. Use this data to refine your email content and sending practices.
Leverage AWS CLI and Boto3: Utilize the provided AWS CLI commands and Boto3 scripts to automate the process of sending emails with Feedback-ID headers, ensuring consistent and accurate tracking.

By following these steps, you can enhance your email deliverability, reduce spam complaints, and maintain a strong sender reputation. For more information on using Amazon SES and Google’s Postmaster Tools, refer to the Amazon SES Documentation and the Postmaster Tools Guide.

How to use SES Mail Manager SMTP Relay action to deliver inbound email to Google Workspace and Microsoft 365

2024-06-25 Zip Zieper

Post Syndicated from Zip Zieper original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/how-to-use-ses-mail-manager-smtp-relay-action-to-deliver-inbound-email-to-google-workspace-and-microsoft-365/

Introduction

Customers often ask us if the Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) inbound capabilities they use with applications hosted on AWS infrastructure can also be used to process and automate employee email hosted on public services like Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. The answer has typically been “yes, but with some limitations”, as until now, SES inbound has been somewhat constrained by the fact that it didn’t support relaying messages for an existing domain. This limitation makes it very difficult to fully manage email flows across hybrid email environments.

Such conversations led the SES team to create Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) Mail Manager which offers a set of capabilities that simplify managing large volumes of email communications within an organization. Mail Manager’s rules set conditions and actions can optimize routing for improved delivery and communication flow, both for incoming and outgoing emails. Mail Manager’s email security features can be augmented by optional add-ons from industry-leading, vetted third-party providers. Flexible archiving features help organizations meet stringent compliance and record-keeping requirements.

In this blog, we position Mail Manager as a central ingress gateway for a fictitious company, Nutrition.co, that is based on real-world AWS customers. We discuss the customer challenges and explain how to configure Mail Manager’s SMTP Relay action to intercept, archive then deliver emails destined for employees’ Google Workspace hosted Gmail and Microsoft 365 hosted Exchange Online mailboxes. Similar mail flows can be used to process, automate and archive emails destined for their AWS hosted apps.

You can learn more about all of Mail Manager’s capabilities here.

Customer background and use case

Our fictitious company, Nutrition.co, is an online retail business with multiple employee departments, including administration, marketing, sales and fulfillment. The company has acquired several smaller rivals that use both Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 to host their employee inboxes, and plan to consolidate all users onto the same domain ( such as [email protected] and [email protected]). They also host several applications on Amazon Web Services (AWS) that use Amazon SES’ inbound capability to receive emails using a subdomain *customer-support*.nutrition.co, such as orders@*customer-support*.nutrition.co and returns@*customer-support*.nutrition.co.

Nutrition.co is looking for a solution to unify all their email domain routing, security and archiving processes onto one centralized management system to simplify their email infrastructure. They want an approach that provides more flexibility to control which addresses and domains are used for apps and automation as well as employee mail. They also want to enhance email compliance and governance with a flexible solution for screening, processing and archiving inbound emails to both employees and applications, before delivering those emails to recipient inboxes on Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 and applications hosted on AWS.

The SES Mail Manger based central ingress and egress gateway architecture we propose will allow Nutrition.co to manage their peer-to-peer and application-driven emails in one place, Amazon SES. It will simplify email security and management, and make it easy to unlock new cloud-enabled email use cases. The architecture can be modified to acommodate a wide variety of email infrastructure, including fully cloud hosted, on-premises, and hybrid mailbox hosting environments.

What is an Inbound SMTP Gateway?

An Inbound SMTP Gateway is an SMTP server that accepts inbound email via an Open Ingress Point, and then delivers those messages to another email environment’s inbound SMTP server. In the diagram below, Mail Manger is configured as an inbound SMTP Gateway:

Figure 1: Diagram of the inbound gateway mail flow to a mailbox hosting environment

“Inbound email” refers to email traffic flows where the originator of the message can be either a trusted (for example: the UK division of Nutrition.co) or an untrusted (for example: a Nutrition.co customer or vendor) entity. To send an email, the originating email system looks up the recipient domain’s MX record in the global DNS system to determine the address for the recipient’s inbound mail server. Once a connection is established on port 25, the originating server delivers the email message using the SMTP protocol typically using STARTTLS for transport level encryption. Inbound messages are typically authenticated using the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC industry standard protocols, which help ensure the messages are coming from the legitimate sender’s domain.

An Inbound SMTP gateway can act on messages, for example to process and/or archive, before passing them along to the end recipient’s email server. To learn more about archiving emails in transit, visit this blog.

Configuring Mail Manager as an Inbound SMTP Gateway

Before we can configure Mail Manager as an Inbound Gateway for Nutrition.co’s Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 hosted mailboxes, we need to “allow-list” Mail Manager in Nutrition.co’s Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 settings. Allow-listing in this context refers to configuring the hosted mailbox environments such that Mail Manager is not identified as the source of messages, but rather as an SMTP relay.

This configuration is necessary because the messages being relayed through Mail Manager originate from both trusted and untrusted senders. This mail flow will contain both wanted and, potentially, unwanted messages. Mail Manager is the intermediary, not the source of potentially unwanted email passing through Mail Manager’s Open Ingress Point before being relayed to the destination mailbox environment.

If Mail Manager is not allow-listed, inbound email that is relayed thru Mail Manager’s Open Ingress Point will fail SPF checks because the IP addresses of the intermediary server are not authorized by the domain’s SPF policy. Since DMARC relies on SPF, messages from intermediary mail servers will fail the domain’s DMARC policy if they are not signed with a domain-aligned DKIM signature.

Mailbox hosting environments and their anti-spam algorithms rely on SPF, DKIM and DMARC for authenticating different inbound mail flow configurations before making an assessment about the message’s disposition. Properly authenticated messages, if not otherwise identified as unwanted by recipients and their security administrator, are delivered to Inboxes. Messages that are not authenticated are more likely to be treated as spam. Messages from intermediary servers can sometimes be mistaken as spoofed or unwanted messages.

By allow-listing the egress IP addresses of the Mail Manager servers, Nutrition.co’s Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 hosting environments will be able to assess the correct SPF result when receiving inbound email from Mail Manager.

Note: Do not include Mail Manager’s IP addresses in the domain’s SPF policy, These IP addresses are shared by other Mail Manager customers so including them in the domain’s SPF policy can introduce a security risk.

Note: It is also possible to use DKIM and ARC for allow-listing mail streams, but Gmail and Exchange Online both support IP allow-listing.

Note: Nutrition.co’s Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 hosting environments may still make a spam assessment about the messages under the context that Mail Manager is not the original sender, but this is not common.

Figure 2: Diagram of the SES Mail Manager architecture to accept inbound email via an open Ingress endpoint and configured with a Rule set condition to relay messages with the SMTP Relay action.

In the diagram above, the interaction points are as follows:

1. Email senders look in DNS to discover the MX record for example.com.
2. The value of the domain’s MX record is the A record of the Mail Manager Ingress endpoint. The Ingress endpoint is configured as an ‘open’ Ingress endpoint so that it can receive inbound email without requiring SMTP Auth
3. The Ingress endpoint traffic policy is configured to allow and deny traffic
4. The Rule Set conditions determine which messages are to be relayed
5. The SMTP Relay action relays messages for recipients that are SES verified identities

Configuring Mail Manager as an Inbound SMTP Gateway

Prerequisites

Access to the administrative console for Nutrition.co’s Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 hosted mailboxes
Access to the DNS zone hosting the MX records for the Nutrition.co’s domains

Step 1: Allow-list the regional Mail Manager IP addresses in Nutrition.co’s Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, and create the Mail Manager relay action(s) in AWS SES console.

If you do not configure the allow-list Nutrition.co’s Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 hosted, it may cause those mailbox providers to reject as spam or send to junk the emails replayed from your Mail Manager environment.

Step 1-a: Follow the instructions to allow-list Mail Manager to relay email to Nutrition.co’s Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 environments.

Step1-b: Create an SMTP relay for your mailbox hosting environment

* See Creating an SMTP relay in the SES console

Figure 3: Screenshot of an SMTP Relay rule action configured for Microsoft 365 Exchange Online inbound receiving

Figure 4: Screenshot of an SMTP Relay rule action configured for Google Workspaces Gmail inbound receiving

Because Nutrition.co hosts email in both Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, we must create SMTP Relay actions for both.

Step 2: In SES console, verify Nutrition.co’s email domain, which is nutrition.co

SES needs to prove that Nutrition.co owns the domain of each of the recipient addresses before it will begin relaying inbound email. If you cannot verify ownership of the recipient email destinations, SES will not relay messages.

Follow the instructions to verify Nutrition.co’s SES domain identity for the recipient email addresses within Nutrition.co’s Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 environments. (*note that subdomains such as customer-support.nutrition.co inherit verification from the parent domain*).

See Creating a domain identity

Figure 5: Screenshot of a successfully verified domain in the SES console.

Step 3: Configure Mail Manager with an Open Ingress Point and Rule Set Action to relay inbound email to the mailbox hosting environment.

Step 3-a: See Create a Traffic Policy to accept inbound email from the internet.

Default action: Allow
(Optional) Add Policy statements, depending on your requirements. Choose the action to be taken when the filter conditions are met: Deny
- While Nutrition.co does not want to apply additional security via the SMTP Relay gateway, Mail Manager supports both native capabilities and optional add-on subscriptions to 3rd party tools from vetted industry leaders such as Spamhaus and Abusix.

Figure 6: Screenshot of a traffic policy for accepting all email from the internet

Step 3-b: Follow the instructions for creating rule sets and rules in the SES console.

Select the SMTP Relay that you created in Step 1-b and enable the **Preserve Mail From** option.
- The ‘Preserve Mail From’ setting is necessary so that the mailbox provider can be configured to make the correct assessment of the message’s SPF policy evaluation, assuming that the allow-list configuration Step 1 is complete.
Add any conditions and exceptions for each rule, depending on your needs.
- You may want to create a condition for the SMTP Relay rule so that only messages destined for recipients within your domain are relayed to the appropriate SMTP Relay action, and choose a different action for the recipients who are not hosted in your environment, such as the Archive action.
- If you have both Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 configured as SMTP Relay destinations, you may combine the SMTP Relay actions in a single rule if the conditions are the same, or create them as separate rules if the conditions need to be different

Figure 7: A Mail Manager rule configured with an SMTP Relay action for Google Workspaces and another SMTP Relay actions for Microsoft 365

Step 3-c: Follow the documentation for Creating an Ingress Point.

The Mail Manager Ingress point needs to be ‘Open“ for this use case because internet mail senders need to connect to port 25 and send without SMTP authentication for inbound mail flows.

Type: Open
Traffic policy: Choose the traffic policy that you created step 3-a
Rule set: Choose the rule set that you created in step 3-b

After saving the ingress endpoint settings, you should see something similar in the console.

Figure 8: Screenshot of an ‘open’ Mail Manager Ingress endpoint configured with a rule set and traffic policy

Step 4. Verify your configuration and change your domain’s MX record

Once you have finished configuring Mail Manager with an Inbound Gateway configuration you will have:

An Open ingress point that does not require authentication and has an open traffic policy to allow messages from the internet.
A Rule set with SMTP Relay actions that will relay inbound messages to Google Workspace and/or Microsoft 365.

Step 4-a: Test your configuration

Ingress point: You can test that the Ingress endpoint receives email by using an SMTP capable client application, such as “openssl s_client” from a host that allows for outbound port 25 connections to the A Record of your Open Ingress Point (many ISPs and cloud infrastructure providers block port 25 by default to stop the proliferation of spam on the internet). If you get a “250 OK” response from the SMTP transaction, the Ingress point is configured correctly.
Rule set: You can test your Rule set by sending a message to your Ingress endpoint that has a recipient destination that is both a verified domain, and a domain that is hosted by your mailbox environment. You may want to add the Archive and/or Save to S3 rule actions to occur prior to SMTP Relay. This enables you to view message headers and diagnose issues that may occur during the SMTP relay to the mailbox hosting environments.
Final delivery: You can test the entire mail flow by looking at the received messages in your mailbox hosting environment.
- How to look at received messages in a mailbox hosting environment
  - Google Workspace – From within the Gmail interface, find the message and open the message menu options.

- - Choose “Show original”.

- - (The Screenshot above shows the Gmail ‘Show original“ message headers. The Mail From address (also appears as the Return-path header, and envelope-from value in other headers) is preserved within the @gmail.com domain, and Gmail’s assessment of SPF correctly attributed the message as originating from 209.85.216.51 even though the message was relayed through 206.55.129.47. Since the 209.x.x.x address is in the SPF policy for gmail.com, the message passes SPF due to the allow-list configuration)
  - Microsoft 365 – From within the Outlook on the Web interface, find the message and open the message menu options.
  - Choose “View message details”. You will see the message headers similar to the Gmail example above.

Step 4-b: Change the MX record for your domain.

Note: We recommend using a new subdomain so that you can test this mail flow configuration for a period of time prior to changing the MX record for the primary domain that is actively being used by end users and applications.

Once you have finished testing, you can change the MX record for the domain. The value of the MX record should be the **A Record** of the Open Ingress point along with the priority value.

Figure 13: A screenshot of an MX record configured in Amazon Route 53

Conclusion

In this blog post, we’ve explored how to leverage SES Mail Manager’s SMTP Relay action to simplify the handling of inbound email for organizations that use a mix of email hosting environments, specifically Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. By configuring Mail Manager as an inbound SMTP gateway, our fictitious customer, Nutrition.co was able to centralize the management of their email flows, enhance security through features like traffic policies and rule sets, and ensure compliance through flexible archiving.

The key steps involved setting up allow-listing in the Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 environments, creating SMTP relay configurations in Mail Manager, and updating Nutrition.co domain’s MX record to point to the Mail Manager ingress endpoint. This allowed Nutrition.co to seamlessly route inbound emails destined for both their cloud-hosted employee mailboxes and on-premises applications, processing and archiving the messages before final delivery.

The flexibility of Mail Manager’s SMTP Relay action makes it a powerful tool for organizations looking to unify their email infrastructure, especially in hybrid environments. By acting as a centralized ingress and egress gateway, Mail Manager can help streamline email management, improve security, and unlock new cloud-enabled email use cases. As email continues to be a critical communication channel, solutions like Mail Manager will become increasingly important for businesses looking to maximize the value of their email ecosystem.

Please visit AWS Re:Post to ask and find answers to questions about SES Mail Manager. Talk with your AWS account team if you are interested in exploring Mail Manager in more depth.

Additional blogs related to Mail Manager:

About the Authors

Jesse Thompson is an Email Deliverability Manager with the Amazon Simple Email Service team. His background is in enterprise development and operations, with a focus on email abuse mitigation and encouragement of authenticity practices with open standard protocols. Jesse’s favorite activity outside of technology is recreational curling.

Alexey Kurbatsky

Alexey is a Senior Software Development Engineer at AWS, specializing in building distributed and scalable services. Outside of work, he enjoys exploring nature thru hiking as well as playing guitar.

Zip

How Amazon SES Mail Manager Elevates Email Security and Efficiency

2024-06-10 Pavlos Ioannou Katidis

Post Syndicated from Pavlos Ioannou Katidis original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/how-amazon-ses-mail-manager-elevates-email-security-and-efficiency/

In today’s digital landscape, efficient and secure email management is essential for businesses facing the complexities of cyber threats and regulatory compliance. Companies are seeking ways to safeguard against unauthorized access and apply audit rules, while maintaining operational efficiency. Amazon SES Mail Manager is designed to meet these challenges, offering a suite of features that enhance both inbound and outbound email flows.

Mail Manager provides key components such as traffic policies for detailed email filtering, authenticated ingress endpoints that ensure emails are received only from verified senders, and customizable rule sets that enable administrators to precisely manage email traffic. These tools aim to bolster security and streamline the email management process.

The blog explores Mail Manager’s capabilities by demonstrating how each component works and can be utilized in practical business scenarios. Some common use cases include security, where Mail Manager blocks harmful emails based on IP ranges, TLS versions, and authentication checks while leveraging third-party security add-ons. Another use case is email archiving, where you can use Mail Manager to set up multiple archives with customizable retention periods and encryption, ensuring compliance and easy searchability.

Familiarize with some of mail manager’s key components below before proceeding with the customer use cases.

Mail manager components definition:

Ingress endpoints:
- Open ingress endpoint: a SMTP endpoint responsible for accepting connections, and process SMTP conversation key infrastructure. It’s a key component that utilizes traffic polices and rules that you can configure to determine which emails should be allowed into your organization and which ones should be rejected.
- Authenticated ingress endpoint: Mail sent to your domain has to come from authorized senders whom you’ve shared your SMTP credentials with, such as your on-premise email servers.
Traffic policies: let you determine the email you want to allow or block from your ingress endpoint. A traffic policy consists of one or more policy statements where you allow or deny traffic based on a variety of protocols including recipient address, sender IP address and TLS protocol version.
Rules sets: A Rule set is a container for an ordered set of rules you create to perform actions on your email. Each rule consists of conditions and rules.
Email add-ons: A suite of 3rd party applications that are seamlessly integrated with Amazon SES mail manager. Some of them are Trend Micro Virus Scanning, Abusix Mail intelligence and Spamhaus Domain Block List.

For a deep dive into Mail Manager’s capabilities, ready this blog.

Customer background and use case

Nutrition.co is an online retail business with multiple departments, including marketing, tech, and sales, that send and receive emails. Nutrition.co is looking for a solution to monitor both outbound and inbound emails and apply various controls such as filtering, message processing, and archiving. Nutrition.co uses Outlook as an enterprise mailbox environment for its employees.

Use case 1: Nutrition.co to the world

This use case focuses on the outbound email flow, where Nutrition.co employees are sending emails outside of Nutrition.co. Some of the requirements include the archival of all outbound emails originated by the marketing department, blocking any tech emails exceeding 1mb and scanning the email content of emails originated by sales. These controls should be centrally managed and provide flexibility to edit/create/delete new ones.

Solution: Each department will direct its outbound emails to an authenticated ingress endpoint by configuring an Exchange transport rule. These endpoints ensure that only authorized senders with SMTP credentials can send emails. Each ingress endpoint generates an A record, which is added as an MX record to the DNS provider for each department’s subdomain. Additionally, each ingress endpoint is associated with a specific traffic policy and rule set. According to Nutrition.co’s requirements, all connections between the departments and the ingress endpoints must use TLS 1.3 or higher. Emails that comply with the traffic policies are processed through distinct rule sets. Emails from marketing that comply with DKIM and SPF are first archived and then sent to the recipient via the Send to Internet action. Tech emails have their recipient’s address rewritten to a test email address, while emails from the sales department undergo content scanning before being sent to the final recipients via the Send to Internet action.

SES-Mail-Manager-Outbound

Use case 2: World to Nutrition.co

This use case focuses on the inbound email flow, where third parties send emails to Nutrition.co. Nutrition.co requires inbound emails to align with SPF and DKIM and have TLS 1.3 or higher to be archived. Emails originating from warehouse.com, Nutrition.co’s fulfilment partner, are containing customer order updates. These emails should be processed by Nutrition.co and accordingly update the customers’ order status database. Furthermore, warehouse.com emails should originate from a certain IP range, have TLS 1.3 or higher and align with SPF and DKIM.

Solution: Nutrition.co will use an open ingress endpoint without authentication for all inbound external emails. This is achieved by adding an MX record generated by Mail Manager upon the creation of the ingress endpoint. This ingress endpoint will be associated with a traffic policy that evaluates TLS. If the inbound email conforms to the traffic policy, it will proceed through the rule set condition and actions. The rule set condition is to align with SPF and DKIM and the actions are to be archived and then sent to the final recipient (Nutrition.co employee) via SMTP Relay. Emails containing parcel delivery updates from warehouse.com will be directed to a separate Nutrition.co subdomain, which routes all inbound emails to an authenticated ingress endpoint. Emails from warehouse.com with TLS 1.3 or higher will meet the traffic policy requirements. If they are SPF and DKIM aligned, they will be stored in a Nutrition.co Amazon S3 bucket as part of the rule set. Using Amazon S3 notifications, an AWS Lambda function is invoked upon receiving an email. This function processes the email payload, and performs an API call to update the Nutrition.co customers’ order status database.

SES-Mail-Manager-Inbound

Archiving inbound emails

In the following section, you will use AWS CloudShell and AWS CLI commands to create a traffic policy that rejects emails with TLS versions lower than 1.3, includes an open ingress endpoint, and establishes a ruleset that archives emails that are DKIM aligned.

Prerequisites: Own a domain and have access to its DNS provider, in order to add the MX record.

Navigate to the AWS Management Console and open CloudShell, find CloudShell availability here. Follow the steps below by copying and pasting the AWS CLI commands to the CloudShell terminal. Note that creating and configuring these resources, can also be done from the AWS Console.

# 1. Creating archive

ARCHIVE=$(aws mailmanager create-archive \
  --archive-name NutritionCo \
  --retention RetentionPeriod=THREE_MONTHS \
  --region ${AWS_REGION} \
  --tags Key=Company,Value=NutritionCo | jq -r '.ArchiveId') && echo $ARCHIVE

# 2. Creating traffic policy

TRAFFIC_POLICY=$(aws mailmanager --region ${AWS_REGION} create-traffic-policy \
  --traffic-policy-name ArchiveTrafficPolicy \
  --default-action DENY \
  --policy-statements '[
    {
      "Action": "ALLOW",
      "Conditions": [
        {
          "TlsExpression": {
            "Evaluate": {
              "Attribute": "TLS_PROTOCOL"
            },
            "Operator": "MINIMUM_TLS_VERSION",
            "Value": "TLS1_3"
          }
        }
      ]
    }
  ]'| jq -r '.TrafficPolicyId') && echo $TRAFFIC_POLICY

# 3. Creating Mailmanager RuleSet for archiving

RULE_SET=$(aws mailmanager --region ${AWS_REGION} create-rule-set \
  --rule-set-name ArchiveRuleSet \
  --rules '[
    {
      "Name": "Archive",
      "Actions": [
        {
          "Archive": {
            "TargetArchive": "'"${ARCHIVE}"'"
          }
        }
      ],
      "Conditions": [
        {
          "VerdictExpression": {
            "Evaluate": {
              "Attribute": "DKIM"
            },
            "Operator": "EQUALS",
            "Values": ["PASS"]
          }
        }
      ]
    }
  ]'| jq -r '.RuleSetId') && echo $RULE_SET

# 4. Create ingress endpoint

aws mailmanager --region ${AWS_REGION} create-ingress-point \
--ingress-point-name Archiving \
--type OPEN \
--traffic-policy-id ${TRAFFIC_POLICY} \
--rule-set-id ${RULE_SET}

To view the resources created above, navigate to the Amazon SES console > Mail Manager and view Traffic policies and Rule sets. Below, you can see the rule in edit mode.

Mail-Manager-Ruleset Navigate to Amazon SES > Mail Manager > Ingress endpoint, select the ingress endpoint named Archiving and copy the ARecord, which looks like this <unique-id>.fips.wmjb.mail-manager-smtp.amazonaws.com – see screenshot below. Add this value to your MX record.

Mail-Manager-IngressEndpoint

To test if the MX record has been added successfully, open your local terminal and execute the command below:
nslookup -type=MX <your-domain.com>
The response should return the MX preference and mail exchanger containing the A record value.

Testing

To test if the inbound emails are archived successfully, send an email to an address within the domain for which you have added the MX record. Wait for 3-5 minutes to allow for email processing. Then, navigate to the AWS Management Console, go to Amazon SES, and select Mail Manager. Under Email Archiving, select NutritionCo under Archive and click on Search. This should return all the emails you have sent.

MailManager-Archive

Conclusion & Next steps

In this blog, we delved into the essential features of Amazon SES Mail Manager and its application in managing both inbound and outbound email flows. We explored key components such as traffic policies, authenticated ingress endpoints, and customizable rule sets that enhance security and operational efficiency. Through practical use cases, this blog demonstrates how these features can be implemented to meet the specific needs of a business like Nutrition.co. By leveraging Amazon SES Mail Manager, businesses can significantly enhance their email security and management processes, safeguarding against cyber threats while ensuring compliance and efficiency.

Continue exploring Mail Manager’s features such as SMTP relays and Email add-ons.

About the Authors

Pavlos Ioannou Katidis

Pavlos Ioannou Katidis is an Amazon Pinpoint and Amazon Simple Email Service Senior Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS. He enjoys diving deep into customers’ technical issues and help in designing communication solutions. In his spare time, he enjoys playing tennis, watching crime TV series, playing FPS PC games, and coding personal projects.

Alexey Kiselev

Alexey Kiselev is a Senior SDE working on Amazon Email. Alexey has played a pivotal role in shaping the design, infrastructure, and delivery of MailManager. With years of experience, deep understanding of the industry and a passion for innovation he is enthusiast and a builder with a core area of interest on scalable and cost-effective email management and email security solutions.

Optimizing Email Deliverability: A User-Centric Approach to List Management and Monitoring

2024-06-07 Brett Ezell

Post Syndicated from Brett Ezell original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/optimizing-email-deliverability-a-user-centric-approach-to-list-management-and-monitoring/

This a 2024 update of the 2015 blog post “
Amazon SES Best Practices: Top 5 Best Practices for List Management“. While the fundamental principles of effective email list management remain relevant, the landscape has evolved significantly over the past nine years. This updated post aims to provide
Amazon Simple Email Services (SES) customers with the latest best practices and insights to ensure high deliverability and maintain a strong sender reputation.

Some of the key changes and updates included in this 2024 version are:

Guidance on protecting sign-up forms with CAPTCHA to prevent bot and bad actor sign-ups
Heightened importance of monitoring bounce rates, complaint rates, and delivery delays due to new requirements from several mailbox providers (MBPs)
Introduction to Amazon SES’s Virtual Deliverability Manager (VDM) tool, and a quick explanation how it can help identify deliverability issues
Updated recommendations on maintaining an engaged subscriber list which includes proactively removing inactive recipients
Emphasis on the industry-wide adoption of mandatory one-click unsubscribe features and the benefits they provide
Reinforcement of the need to grow email lists organically and avoid the use of purchased/non-consensual lists

By following the best practices outlined in this updated guide, Amazon SES customers can ensure their email campaigns have the best chance at successfully reaching the inbox. Following these best practices will also help build trust with their subscribers which should result in higher returns on their email marketing investment.

In this blog post, we’ll review the following updated best practices to help you maintain a strong email-sending reputation and ensure high deliverability, including:

Use Confirmed Opt-in (AKA, Double Opt-in )
Carefully Monitor Bounces, Complaints, and Delivery Delays
Maintain an Engaged Subscriber List by Removing Inactive Recipients
Make Unsubscribing Easy to Maintain a Clean, Compliant List
Build Trust by Growing Your List Organically

Use Confirmed Opt-in (AKA, Double Opt-in )

Targeting active and engaged users is one of the most effective ways to maintain a strong sender reputation. This time-tested best practice is known as confirmed opt-in (also known as double opt-in). This process is quick to implement and highly effective. When a user signs up for a newsletter or special offer using their email address via a form on your website, you should verify the legitimacy of the email address by sending a verification email to the provided address and asking the requestor to click a link that confirms their consent to receive your emails. By clicking this link, the email address owner explicitly provides their consent to receiving email notifications. Once the recipient verifies the request, you then add their email address to your active mailing list. Most users are now familiar with this type of verification, and legitimate recipients will have no trouble confirming their interest.

Our guidance regarding the confirmed opt-in best practice has evolved due to the prevalence of online bots and bad actors. To maintain a strong sender reputation, we now recommend protecting your web sign-up forms with a CAPTCHA (or similar mechanism). This helps ensure the requests to join your mailing list come from a real human, not a ‘bot or some form of automation or deception. Only after a requestor proves they are human would you accept their email address and then send the verification email. This additional layer of protection prevents bots and bad actors from signing up users without their consent.

CAPTCHA has become a foundational element of the double opt-in process. Protecting the sign-up process with a CAPTCHA will limit the number of unsolicited confirmation messages sent to users, and subsequently reduce the chances of mailbox providers labeling the confirmation messages as spam. If the confirmation messages are blocked by MBPs, then the double opt-in process simply isn’t viable.

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Figure 1: AWS WAF CAPTCHA examples.

By verifying the legitimacy of your email recipients upfront through confirmed opt-in, you will reduce the number of invalid recipient bounces associated with fake emails, typographical errors, and illegitimate sign-ups by bad actors and bots. This is crucial, as these types of invalid addresses can negatively impact your sending reputation.

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Figure 2: A diagram showing the ideal confirmed opt-in architecture to limit risk of bot abuse.

Adding a CAPTCHA on the sign-up web form proves that a human is interacting with the sign-up process.
Ensuring the link is clicked proves that a person or application with access to the mailbox was able to click the link.
Requiring the recipient to enter the correct one-time passcode, commonly referred to as OTP, into the web form proves that the human requesting sign-up is the same as the person confirming the sign-up
Monitoring bounce, complaint, and delivery delay events proves that the email address is valid and that there are not recipients who are marking the confirmation messages as spam.
- Use a subdomain for sending the confirmation messages to limit reputational impact on deliverability in case there are signs of web form abuse
- If there are signs of web form abuse, give recipients an easy option to report abuse so that they don’t mark the messages as spam.

Confirmed opt-in ensures you only send to subscribers who have explicitly consented to receive your messages. By honoring their subscription preferences, you further reduce the chances of complaints. Providing recipients with an easy, one-click unsubscribe option is crucial, as it demonstrates your commitment to respecting their communication preferences.

Many successful senders capitalize on the verification window by immediately sending a welcome email. This offers two key benefits:

1. Boost Engagement: While conveying a warm welcome, the email subtly re-engages the new subscriber, and keeps your brand fresh in their mind.
2. Double-Duty Verification: These emails often include a call-to-action (CTA) that serves as additional verification and validation of the recipient’s interest in receiving your emails.
3. Increases Trust in your Brand: By offering an easy way to unsubscribe from the welcome email, it gives recipients confidence that they will be able to unsubscribe at any time.

Carefully Monitor Bounces, Complaints, and Delivery Delays

Update: Monitoring these metrics has become substantially more important due to recent changes by mailbox providers. As of February 2024, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other MBPs now require all bulk-senders to keep their spam complaint rates below 0.3%. These MBPs explain that maintaining a low spam complaint rate benefits both senders and recipients by enhancing email deliverability, preserving sender reputation, and fostering a more positive user experience for their in-box subscribers.

To fully understand the latest industry standards and requirements, we recommend:

Read the Overview: Get a quick grasp of the key compliance guidelines
Watch the Webinar: Dive deeper into the specific details and best practices presented by the AWS and Gmail teams.

Amazon SES provides real-time feedback on bounces, complaints, and delivery delay events through its event publishing feature. This enables you to quickly identify and remove problematic email addresses, ensuring you maintain a clean and healthy subscriber list.

If you receive a hard bounce or a complaint, it’s essential to remove that email address from your list and investigate the root cause. For example, a sudden increase in bounce and/or complaint rates for new subscriptions may indicate an issue with fake sign-ups. In such cases, leveraging confirmed opt-in (the BCP, or best current practice, of list building) can help discourage this problem. By using a separate domain for your signups and OTPs, you can distinguish bounces and complaints from sign-ups and other transactional message types, in comparison to your marketing or promotional messages.. More can be found here.

Amazon SES’s Virtual Deliverability Manager (VDM) is an Amazon SES feature that helps senders identify deliverability trends and potential deliverability issues without the need to build additional dashboards. VDM provides deep insights into your sending data and offers actionable recommendations to improve deliverability. VDM helps monitor bounce rates, complaint rates, and other key performance indicators (KPIs) to support email delivery success metrics. VDM allows senders to explore deliverability issues, including the ability to drill down from account level statistics all the way down to the individual message level. This will help identify problematic emails without needing to sift through all of your deliverability data. Key capabilities include:

Bounce Details: Use VDM to identify bounced emails by recipient addresses, timestamps. and SMTP response codes. These are received directly from the recipient mailbox providers. Users can then group emails by bounce type (permanent and transient) and recipient domains to analyze and take correct action before before smaller deliverability events like message delays turn into larger problems like messages being blocked by the MBPs.
Complaints: Identify recipients who marked emails as spam so they can be removed from the active mailing list.
- Note: for metric tracking tied specifically to Gmail recipients, customers should also be monitoring Google Postmaster Tools to track their reputation and keep their spam complaint rates low.
Delivery Metrics: Monitor delivery attempts, retries, and success to make informed decisions based on real-time data to continuously improve deliverability.

VDM proactively flags potential problems like bounces and complaints that could harm your sender reputation and delivery rates. By addressing these issues early, you can verify that your emails consistently reach the inbox, instead of the spam folder.

While VDM is a paid service for Amazon SES customers, there is a free tier that provides a flexible way to test out the tool without any expenses or commitments.

To dive deeper into VDM consult these resources:

Explore the Improve Email Deliverability with VDM: resource to learn about the feature’s capabilities and benefits.
Discover how to Access VDM and DMARC Reports Outside of the AWS Console using Amazon QuickSight.

For additional guidance on SES bounce and complaint monitoring, refer to the following resources:
Amazon SES Documentation:

Amazon SES Blog Posts:

Maintain an Engaged Subscriber List by Removing Inactive Recipients

As an email marketer, you must operate under the assumption that if a subscriber is not opening your emails, or is no longer engaging with the calls-to-action in your emails, they are no longer interested in the content that you are sending. Subscribers who fall into this category should be periodically removed from your mailing lists to help ensure your subscriber lists are healthy and engaged. Increase campaign success and deliverability by periodically reviewing and updating your subscription lists with this two-pronged approach:

Track Subscriber Engagement with Amazon SES

Amazon SES provides methods to monitor your sending activity using events, metrics, and statistics. These monitoring methods can be used to measure the rates at which your customers engage with the emails you send. For example, you can identify your overall open and click through rates by utilizing SES’ event publishing when using custom email domains that you associate with configuration sets as discussed in the SES documentation.

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Figure 3: Serverless Architecture to Analyze Amazon SES events

To track your email sending activities at a granular level, refer to the AWS blog post, Analyzing Amazon SES event data with AWS Analytics Services.

Proactively Remove Non-Engaging Subscribers

Imagine a scenario where a subscriber signs up for your email list but never engages by opening or clicking through your messages. This lack of activity could indicate the subscriber’s loss of interest. To address this, we recommend you set a reasonable timeframe for engagement based on your industry standards (e.g., 6 months of no opens or clicks). However, this timeframe may need to be adjusted depending on how regularly you send emails to your subscribers. For instance, if you send a daily newsletter, a 6-month period of inactivity may be too long before removing the subscriber. Conversely, if you only send monthly updates, a 6-month window may be more appropriate. The key is to find the right balance – remove subscribers who have clearly lost interest, but don’t be too hasty in culling your list if they simply don’t engage as frequently as your regular email cadence. By tailoring the engagement timeframe to your specific email frequency, you can ensure your subscriber list remains active and engaged.

Consider a “Win-back” Email Campaign

Before removing completely inactive subscribers from your list, consider sending them a special “win-back” email. This final attempt to re-engage them can be an effective strategy to win-back valuable subscribers. The win-back email should have a clear and compelling call-to-action, encouraging recipients to re-engage with the messages you are sending to them. This could include updating their preferences or confirming their interest in your messages. By giving these subscribers another chance, you may be able to reactivate a portion of your list and retain those recipients. However, if the win-back email fails to elicit a response, it’s best to remove those addresses from your active mailing list to maintain a healthy, engaged subscriber base.

Even subscribers who originally opted in through a confirmed double opt-in process can become inactive over time. Occasionally these email addresses are abandoned and can be converted into spam traps by the domain owner. Spam traps are email addresses used by organizations to identify senders who may not be following best practices for list building and long-term list hygiene. If you continue to email these inactive addresses, several negative consequences can occur. our domain could be at risk of generating poor reputation at a mailbox provider, or end up on a real-time blocklist, which may impact deliverability to multiple mailbox providers. In some cases, this could result in your Amazon SES service being suspended.

Proactively removing non-engaging subscribers is the only way to avoid these potential pitfalls and maintain a strong sender reputation.

For a deeper dive into the topic, refer to the following resources:

Removing inactive subscribers is a powerful complement to your confirmed opt-in practices, helping you maintain a healthy, high-performing email list.

Make Unsubscribing Easy to Maintain a Clean, Compliant List

Update: Providing recipients with clear, easy-to-use unsubscribe options has become even more crucial due to recent changes by major email providers.

As of February 2024, Google and Yahoo now require all bulk email senders to include a prominent unsubscribe link within their messages. In June 2024 the implementation of one-click unsubscribe headers (as defined by RFC 2369 and RFC 8058) also become mandatory across the industry.

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Figure 4: A diagram of one-click unsubscribe flow.

The new industry wide bulk sender requirements ultimately benefit both senders and recipients by:

Reducing Spam Complaints – Easy unsubscribe options decrease the likelihood of frustrated recipients marking your emails as spam. This helps maintain a positive sender reputation.
Improving Sender Reputation – A clean email list with engaged and consented subscribers keeps your sender reputation healthy, ensuring your messages consistently reach the inbox rather than the spam folder.

It is critical you respect your audience’s wishes as they relate to your email sending. When you offer recipients a straightforward, easy unsubscribe path to manage their communication preferences, it will allow you keep your email lists clean and compliant which helps you maintain a strong sender reputation. Many regions, including the US, Canada, and parts of Europe and Asia, have adopted laws requiring senders to provide clear, accessible unsubscribe mechanisms. Adhering to these regulations helps you avoid potential legal issues related to your sending and local messaging laws.

Amazon SES provides a basic, subscription management capability that supports the Bulk Sender Requirements as outlined in the SES documentation. Some SES customers have opted to develop & deploy their own custom, more comprehensive systems, to process end-user unsubscribe requests. For a deeper dive into the topic, refer to the AWS blog post Using one-click unsubscribe with Amazon SES.

Build Trust by Growing Your List Organically

Avoid the Temptation of Shortcuts

It may be tempting to take shortcuts, such as using purchased email lists from brokers. However, these “opt-in” addresses often belong to recipients who signed up for the broker’s list, not yours. Relying on these non-organic lists can lead to disastrous consequences:

Spam Complaints: Recipients who never consented to receive your emails are much more likely to mark them as spam, harming your sender reputation.
Legal Issues: Many countries, especially with the new <0.3% spam rate requirement, have strict laws prohibiting the use of non-consensual email lists.
Unsubscribes and Lost Trust: Sending unwanted emails can result in high unsubscribe rates and damage your brand’s reputation.

Focus on Building Your List Organically

Instead of acquiring lists from brokers, focus on building your email list organically by following the best practices we’ve discussed, such as confirmed opt-in and clear unsubscribe options. This will help you attract and retain engaged subscribers who genuinely want to receive your content, fostering trust and a positive sender-to-recipient relationship.

Respect Individual Preferences

It’s crucial to respect each recipient’s communication preferences, even within your own organization. Just because someone signed up for emails from Brand A doesn’t mean they want to receive messages from Brand B, even if both brands are from the same company. Sending these types of cross-brand unsolicited emails can harm your reputation and lead to spam complaints. To avoid this common pitfall, build separate email lists for each of your brands. This ensures recipients only receive the content they’ve explicitly opted-in for, strengthening their trust and increasing engagement.

The long-term benefits of an organically grown, engaged email list are well documented and include improved deliverability, higher open/click rates and better return on your email marketing investments.

Land in Inboxes, Not Spam Folders: The Power of Streamlined List Management

Throughout this updated guide, we’ve explored five essential best practices for email list management that can help Amazon SES customers maintain a strong sender reputation and ensure high deliverability.

We initially discussed the importance of confirmed opt-in (or double opt-in), and how incorporating CAPTCHA has become a foundational element to protect against bot and bad actor sign-ups. By verifying the legitimacy of your subscribers upfront, you minimize the impact of invalid addresses and reduce the chances of complaints as a result of form abuse.

Next, we emphasized the heightened need to carefully monitor key metrics like bounces, complaints, and delivery delays. We discussed email management tools and features like Amazon SES Virtual Deliverability Manager that can provide critical deliverability insight into your email program. Addressing deliverability issues early is crucial to preserving your sender reputation and keeping your messages flowing to the inbox.

We also covered strategies for maintaining an engaged subscriber list, including proactively removing inactive recipients and considering targeted “winback” campaigns. Keeping your list fresh and responsive pays dividends in the form of better inbox placement and campaign performance.

Making unsubscribing easy for recipients has likewise become an essential practice, not just for compliance but also for building trust and reducing spam complaints. The one-click unsubscribe standards now required by mailbox providers work to the benefit of both senders and recipients.

Lastly, we stressed the importance of organic list growth over shortcuts like purchased email lists. Respecting individual preferences, even within your own brand, helps you attract and retain subscribers who are genuinely interested in your content.

By adhering to these five best practices of email list management, you’ll be able to build and maintain a marketing asset in the form of an email list that will provide you a long-term channel for communicating with your customers and end-users.

If you have any questions or need further guidance, feel free to reach out to us via the
SES Forums or in the comments section of this blog post. We’re here to help you navigate the evolving email landscape and unlock the full potential of your Amazon SES investment.

About the Authors

Brett Ezell is your friendly neighborhood Solutions Architect at AWS, where he specializes in helping customers optimize their SMS and email campaigns using Amazon Pinpoint and Amazon Simple Email Service. As a former US Navy veteran, Brett brings a unique perspective to his work, ensuring customers receive tailored solutions to meet their needs. In his free time, Brett enjoys live music, collecting vinyl, and the challenges of a good workout. And, as a self-proclaimed comic book aficionado, he can often be found combing through his local shop for new books to add to his collection.

Zip is an Amazon Pinpoint and Amazon Simple Email Service Sr. Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS. Outside of work he enjoys time with his family, cooking, mountain biking and plogging.

Mail Manager – Amazon SES introduces new email routing and archiving features

2024-05-22 Vinay Ujjini

Post Syndicated from Vinay Ujjini original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/mail-manager-amazon-ses-introduces-new-email-routing-and-archiving-features/

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is a cloud-based email sending service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS), handling both inbound and outbound email traffic for your applications. It allows users to send and receive email using SES’s reliable and cost-effective infrastructure without having to provision email servers yourself.

Managing multiple email workloads at scale can be a daunting task for organizations. From handling high volumes of emails to routing them efficiently, and ensuring uniform compliance with regulations, the challenges can be overwhelming. Managing different types of outbound emails, whether one-to-one user email, transactional or marketing emails generated from applications, also becomes challenging due to increasing concerns of security and compliance requirements. To help customers tackle these pain points, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has introduced a new feature to streamline inbound and outbound email management: SES Mail Manager.

The challenge: Managing different email flows efficiently with compliance and security in place

Efficiently routing and processing emails to the appropriate teams or systems while ensuring proper filtering, security, and compliance is a complex undertaking. Meanwhile, outbound email flows have become increasing complex. Besides emails being sent between users, more and more emails are generated from different types of applications. On top of that, keeping up security and compliance requirements is an ongoing task for all IT administrators and CISOs. Maintaining email integrations with existing business applications, providing scalability and redundancy to accommodate spikes, and facilitating long-term archiving and retrieval further compound the difficulties. Without a robust and scalable solution, organizations struggle to manage email communications effectively, hindering productivity and exposing themselves to risks.

Solution: Amazon SES Mail Manager

Amazon SES Mail Manager is a comprehensive solution with powerful set of email gateway features that strengthens your organization’s email infrastructure. It simplifies email workflow management and streamlines compliance control, while integrating seamlessly with your existing systems. Mail Manager consolidates all incoming and outgoing email through a single control point. This allows you to apply unified tools, rules, and delivery behaviors across your entire email flow. The centralized approach improves reliability, security, and flexibility.

Some key capabilities include connecting different business applications, automating inbound email processing, managing outgoing emails, enhancing compliance through email archiving, and efficiently controlling overall email traffic. It provides a centralized hub to optimize email infrastructure, simplify processes, ensure compliance, and maintain a high degree of reliability and security.

SES Inbound today

SES MailManager high level architecture

Mail Manager features

Ingress Endpoints: Customizable SMTP endpoints for receiving emails

Ingress endpoint is a key infrastructure component that utilizes filtering polices and rules that you can configure to determine which emails should be allowed into your organization and which ones should be rejected.

Amazon SES currently offers a way to receive incoming emails from the internet using its SMTP interface called SES Inbound. This provided a shared, regional SMTP endpoint that all SES customers could use to accept emails. Improved upon this, Mail Manager introduces a more flexible and powerful approach with different types of ingress endpoints to handling inbound email with Amazon SES.

Mail Manager now offers two options for customers: Open Ingress Endpoint, Authenticated Ingress Endpoint.

Open Ingress Endpoints allows you to create unique, customizable SMTP endpoints that give you control to accept or reject email messages tailored to your specific needs. Open Ingress Points do not require domain verification to receive inbound emails. Simply point your domain’s MX record to the newly created Ingress Endpoint, and it will start receiving emails for that domain.

Authenticated Ingress Endpoints in Mail Manager also enables a new capability – allowing SES to accept emails from trusted external SMTP servers for further processing. Users can create a Traffic Policy to configure trusted external SMTP servers with either type of Ingress Endpoints. What’s different about Authenticated Ingress Endpoints is, users need to use SMTP Authorization to send messages. Once provisioned, you obtain credentials to connect your existing email infrastructure to the Authenticated Ingress Endpoint as an outgoing email server.

For step-by-step guide on how to create this, refer to documentation.

Ingress Endpoints image

Traffic policies & policy statements

Traffic Policies enable fine-grained control over accepting or rejecting inbound email. A traffic policy is a container for policy statements that you assign to an ingress endpoint, so that it can sort the incoming mail by allowing or blocking specific types of email when the conditions of the policy statements are met. You have the option to set a maximum message size so that any email with a size greater, will immediately be discarded—this acts as a “first pass” filter when set. Next, you set either Allow or Deny as the default action that’s taken for email that falls outside of the conditions of your policy statements. This is the “catch all” action for the traffic policy.

Policy statements are also created with either an allow or block action that is taken when the statements’ conditions are met. You build the conditions by selecting an email protocol and a conditional operator for a value you enter that must be matched by the incoming message before the policy statement will allow or block it. The three conditions available in the policy statement are Recipient address, Sender IP range and TLS protocol version. Each policy statement can have multiple conditions.

MailManager Traffic Policy

Rule Sets & rules

Taking Control with Rule Sets:
After traffic policies permit certain messages into Mail Manager, customers use rule sets to apply custom processing logic for routing, optional functions, archiving, and delivery. You can add multiple Rules within a Rule Set. You can specify the order in which Rules within a Rule Set are evaluated, as well as the order of Actions within each Rule. Each Rule consists of:
Conditions: Criteria that an email must match for the Rule to be applied.
Exceptions: Criteria that, if matched, will exempt the email from the Rule.
Actions: The operations to be performed on emails that meet the Rule’s Conditions and don’t match any Exceptions.

Recipient-Oriented Processing:

Mail Manager processes emails in a recipient-oriented manner, meaning rules are applied separately for each recipient. In traditional email gateways, rules are typically applied at the message level, affecting all recipients uniformly. For instance, if a rule in a traditional gateway adds a header for emails addressed to [email protected], all recipients of that email will see the header. This can lead to unintended side effects where actions meant for one recipient affect others. With Mail Manager, only emails to [email protected] will have the header, ensuring rules are specific to each recipient.

Additionally, Mail Manager allows rules to be applied to all recipients when needed, such as using the Subject header as a rule condition. This flexibility provides greater precision and control in email processing, allowing rules administrators to tailor the application of rules to meet specific requirements for individual recipients or for the entire email.

By enabling both recipient-oriented and message-oriented approaches, it enhances privacy, compliance, and security by preventing unintended data exposure and ensuring actions are applied only where intended.

Flexible Conditions and Actions:
Mail Manager’s Rule Sets offer a powerful expression language for defining conditions based on various email properties, such as recipient address, TLS version, source IP, subject header, and more. Additionally, Rule Sets support a wide range of Actions, including:

Writing to Amazon S3 buckets
Sending outbound messages (leveraging SES’s SMTP capabilities)
Relaying emails to external SMTP servers
Archiving emails for long-term storage
Modifying recipient lists
Delivering to AWS WorkMail mailboxes

With these capabilities, Rule Sets enable you to build sophisticated, automated email processing workflows tailored to your organization’s needs.

RuleSets

MailManager Rules

SMTP Relay

Mail Manager’s SMTP Relay functionality allows you to integrate your inbound email processing workflows with external email infrastructure, such as on-premises Microsoft Exchange servers or third-party email gateways. Mail Manager’s SMTP Relay functionality allows you to integrate your email flows with appropriate servers based on predefined criteria, optimizing the journey of every email.

How SMTP Relay Works:

Define an SMTP Relay – First, you create an SMTP Relay resource within Mail Manager, specifying the details of the external SMTP server you want to relay emails to, such as the server hostname, port, and authentication credentials (if required).
Create a Rule with the SMTP Relay Action Next, within a Rule Set, you create a Rule that includes the “SMTP Relay” action, selecting the SMTP Relay resource you defined earlier.
Configure the Rule Conditions You then set the conditions for this Rule, determining which incoming emails should be relayed to the external SMTP server. For example, you could set a condition to relay all email destined for a specific domain (e.g., “@gmail.com”).
Assign the Rule Set to an Ingress Endpoint Finally, you assign the Rule Set containing this Rule to one or more Ingress Endpoints.

When an email matching the Rule’s conditions is received by the Ingress Endpoint, Mail Manager will automatically relay that email to the external SMTP server specified in the SMTP Relay resource.

Use Cases for SMTP Relay:

Processing layer for incoming emails: Relay incoming emails from Mail Manager after rules engine processing to your email server whether it’s on-premises or cloud email system.
Supporting hybrid and migration: In hybrid email environments where some mailboxes are hosted on-premises and others are in the cloud (e.g., Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace), SMTP relay allows for seamless communication between the two environments. During email migration projects, SMTP relay can be used to temporarily route emails between the old and new email platforms, ensuring that no messages are lost during the transition period.
Mailbox resilience: By terminating MX at Mail Manager, and then configuring rules for delivery to 1 or more mailbox providers, you can manage resilient mailbox delivery if your primary mailbox provider is impaired. No DNS propagation delays, just change the delivery rule and instantly fall into your other system.
Enforcement layer: Integrate Mail Manager with third-party email services or gateways by relaying emails to their SMTP endpoints, leveraging their capabilities to enforce additional policies or security measures while maintaining control with Mail Manager.
Inter-Server Communication: SMTP relay facilitates communication between different internal email servers or systems within the organization’s network, ensuring seamless delivery of emails across various domains or platforms.
Load balancing and redundancy: Distribute email traffic across multiple servers or gateways to optimize performance and resource utilization, ensuring high availability and fault tolerance.

With SMTP Relay, Mail Manager acts as a flexible email processing layer, allowing you to incorporate its powerful capabilities while maintaining and extending your current email infrastructure investments.

SMTP Relay screen

Email Archiving

As organizations face increasing regulatory and compliance requirements around email retention, Mail Manager provides a robust email archiving solution. The archiving feature allows you to securely store and easily search through your email data, ensuring you meet your archiving obligations.

How Email Archiving Works:

You create an archive resource within Mail Manager, specifying the desired retention period for your archived emails.
Create a Rule with the archive action within a Rule Set. Create a Rule that includes the “Archive” action, selecting the Archive resource you defined earlier.
You then set the conditions for this Rule, determining which incoming emails should be archived. For example, you could archive all emails sent to a specific department’s email alias.
Finally, you assign the Rule Set containing this archiving Rule to one or more Ingress Endpoints.

Now, when an email matching the Rule’s conditions is received by the Ingress Endpoint, Mail Manager will automatically archive a verbatim copy of that email to the designated Archive resource.

Mail Manager’s archiving capabilities offer several advantages for organizations:

Archiving stores email data in a secure, durable, and searchable archive, meeting regulatory requirements for email retention and enabling efficient audits.
Utilize powerful search filters to locate specific emails within your archive, and export search results for further analysis or legal purposes.
Reduce the storage burden on your mail servers by archiving emails to Mail Manager’s scalable and cost-effective storage solution.
Set customizable retention periods for your archives, ensuring important email data is preserved for as long as needed.

By integrating email archiving into your Mail Manager workflows, you can maintain a comprehensive, searchable, and compliant email archive without the hassle of managing additional infrastructure.

Email Archiving

Email Add-ons

Mail Manager offers a suite of specialized security tools, called Email Add-ons, that allow you to enhance your email security posture and tailor your inbound email workflows to your specific needs. Add-ons can be used as conditions within Traffic Policies to control which emails are allowed into your Ingress Endpoints, or as conditions within Rule Sets to determine the actions taken on specific email types. These Add-ons are certified security intelligence and enforcement solutions from vetted providers, ready to be integrated directly into your Mail Manager environment (e.g., Spamhaus Domain Block List, Abusix Mail Intelligence, Trend Micro Virus Scanning).

Email Add-Ons provide a flexible and modular approach to email security, enabling you to select and combine the solutions that best fit your unique use cases. Instead of investing in a monolithic product that may not fully align with your requirements, you can choose from a range of Add-ons and pay only for the capabilities you need, on a metered-price basis. Once you’ve subscribed to an Email Add-on from the Mail Manager console, you can seamlessly incorporate it into your email workflows.

Email Add-ons extend Mail Manager’s core threat intelligence and security enforcement features on a per-workload basis, ensuring you have the right level of protection without over-provisioning resources. Within the Mail Manager console, you can explore detailed product descriptions, key benefits, and pricing information for each Add-on, empowering you to make informed decisions.

Key benefits of Add-ons:

Immediate use: no separate setup/integration work required.
Cost effective: pay for only what is needed and consumed, turn on and off as required
Granular deployment via individual traffic policy or rule action

Conclusion:

Amazon SES Mail Manager introduces advanced email routing and archiving features, providing significant benefits to customers. With customizable SMTP endpoints and recipient-oriented rule processing, customers gain precise control over email traffic, ensuring that rules are applied specifically to each recipient. The enhanced traffic policies improve email security and compliance, while the robust SMTP relay functionality seamlessly integrates with existing systems, ensuring efficient email routing and processing. Mail Manager’s archiving capabilities help meet regulatory requirements and simplify data management. Overall, Mail Manager streamlines email operations, optimizes infrastructure, and enhances reliability, security, and compliance, offering a powerful solution for managing complex email workflows.

About the Authors:

Jessica Fan is a Senior Product Manager at AWS, striving to improve the experience for Amazon SES customers. Outside of work, she enjoys long distance running, biking and bouldering.

Vinay Ujjini is an Amazon Pinpoint and Amazon Simple Email Service Worldwide Principal Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS. He has been solving customer’s omni-channel challenges for over 15 years. He is an avid sports enthusiast and in his spare time, enjoys playing tennis & cricket.

Serverless IoT email capture, attachment processing, and distribution

2024-04-18 Stacy Conant

Post Syndicated from Stacy Conant original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/serverless-iot-email-capture-attachment-processing-and-distribution/

Many customers need to automate email notifications to a broad and diverse set of email recipients, sometimes from a sensor network with a variety of monitoring capabilities. Many sensor monitoring software products include an SMTP client to achieve this goal. However, managing email server infrastructure requires specialty expertise and operating an email server comes with additional cost and inherent risk of breach, spam, and storage management. Organizations also need to manage distribution of attachments, which could be large and potentially contain exploits or viruses. For IoT use cases, diagnostic data relevance quickly expires, necessitating retention policies to regularly delete content.

Solution Overview

This solution uses the Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) SMTP interface to receive SMTP client messages, and processes the message to replace an attachment with a pre-signed URL in the resulting email to its intended recipients. Attachments are stored separately in an Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket with a lifecycle policy implemented. This reduces the storage requirements of recipient email server receiving notification emails. Additionally, this solution leverages built-in anti-spam and security scanning capabilities to deal with spam and potentially malicious attachments while at the same time providing the mechanism by which pre-signed attachment links can be revoked should the emails be distributed to unintended recipients.

The solution uses:

Amazon SES SMTP interface to receive incoming emails.
Amazon SES receipt rule on a (sub)domain controlled by administrators, to store raw incoming emails in an Amazon S3 bucket.
AWS Lambda function, triggered on S3 ObjectCreated event, to process raw emails, extract attachments, replace each with pre-signed URL with configurable expiry, and send the processed emails to intended recipients.

Solution Flow Details:

SMTP client transmits email content to an email address in a (sub) domain with MX record set to Amazon SES service’s regional endpoint.
Amazon SES SMTP interface receives an email and forwards it to SES Receipt Rule(s) for processing.
A matching Amazon SES Receipt Rule saves incoming email into an Amazon S3 Bucket.
Amazon S3 Bucket emits an S3 ObjectCreated Event, and places the event onto the Amazon Simple Queue Services (SQS) queue.
The AWS Lambda service polls the inbound messages’ SQS queue and feeds events to the Lambda function.
The Lambda function, retrieves email files from the S3 bucket, parses the email sender/subject/body, saves attachments to a separate attachment S3 bucket (7), and replaces attachments with pre-signed URLs in the email body. The Lambda function then extracts intended recipient addresses from the email body. If the body contains properly formatted recipients list, email is then sent using SES API (9), otherwise a notice is posted to a fallback Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) Topic (8).
The Lambda function saves extracted attachments, if any, into an attachments bucket.
Malformed email notifications are posted to a fallback Amazon SNS Topic.
The Lambda function invokes Amazon SES API to send the processed email to all intended recipient addresses.
If the Lambda function is unable to process email successfully, the inbound message is placed on to the SQS dead-letter queue (DLQ) queue for later intervention by the operator.
SES delivers an email to each recipients’ mail server.
Intended recipients download emails from their corporate mail servers and retrieve attachments from the S3 pre-signed URL(s) embedded in the email body.
An alarm is triggered and a notification is published to Amazon SNS Alarms Topic whenever:
- More than 50 failed messages are in the DLQ.
- Oldest message on incoming SQS queue is older than 3 minutes – unable to keep up with inbound messages (flooding).
- The incoming SQS queue contains over 180 messages (configurable) over 5 minutes old.

Setting up Amazon SES

For this solution you will need an email account where you can receive emails. You’ll also need a (sub)domain for which you control the mail exchanger (MX) record. You can obtain your (sub)domain either from Amazon Route53 or another domain hosting provider.

Verify the sender email address

You’ll need to follow the instructions to Verify an email address for all identities that you use as “From”, “Source”, ” Sender”, or “Return-Path” addresses. You’ll also need to follow these instructions for any identities you wish to send emails to during initial testing while your SES account is in the “Sandbox” (see next “Moving out of the SES Sandbox” section).

Moving out of the SES Sandbox

Amazon SES accounts are “in the Sandbox” by default, limiting email sending only to verified identities. AWS does this to prevent fraud and abuse as well as protecting your reputation as an email sender. When your account leaves the Sandbox, SES can send email to any recipient, regardless of whether the recipient’s address or domain is verified by SES. However, you still have to verify all identities that you use as “From”, “Source”, “Sender”, or “Return-Path” addresses.
Follow the Moving out of the SES Sandbox instructions in the SES Developer Guide. Approval is usually within 24 hours.

Set up the SES SMTP interface

Follow the workshop lab instructions to set up email sending from your SMTP client using the SES SMTP interface. Once you’ve completed this step, your SMTP client can open authenticated sessions with the SES SMTP interface and send emails. The workshop will guide you through the following steps:

Create SMTP credentials for your SES account.
- IMPORTANT: Never share SMTP credentials with unauthorized individuals. Anyone with these credentials can send as many SMTP requests and in whatever format/content they choose. This may result in end-users receiving emails with malicious content, administrative/operations overload, and unbounded AWS charges.
Test your connection to ensure you can send emails.
Authenticate using the SMTP credentials generated in step 1 and then send a test email from an SMTP client.

Verify your email domain and bounce notifications with Amazon SES

In order to replace email attachments with a pre-signed URL and other application logic, you’ll need to set up SES to receive emails on a domain or subdomain you control.

Verify the domain that you want to use for receiving emails.
Publish a mail exchanger record (MX record) and include the Amazon SES inbound receiving endpoint for your AWS region ( e.g. inbound-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com for US East Northern Virginia) in the domain DNS configuration.
Amazon SES automatically manages the bounce notifications whenever recipient email is not deliverable. Follow the Set up notifications for bounces and complaints guide to setup bounce notifications.

Deploying the solution

The solution is implemented using AWS CDK with Python. First clone the solution repository to your local machine or Cloud9 development environment. Then deploy the solution by entering the following commands into your terminal:

python -m venv .venv
. ./venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

cdk deploy \
--context SenderEmail=<verified sender email> \
 --context RecipientEmail=<recipient email address> \
 --context ConfigurationSetName=<configuration set name>

Note:

The RecipientEmail CDK context parameter in the cdk deploy command above can be any email address in the domain you verified as part of the Verify the domain step. In other words, if the verified domain is acme-corp.com, then the emails can be [email protected], [email protected], etc.

The ConfigurationSetName CDK context can be obtained by navigating to Identities in Amazon SES console, selecting the verified domain (same as above), switching to “Configuration set” tab and selecting name of the “Default configuration set”

After deploying the solution, please, navigate to Amazon SES Email receiving in AWS console, edit the rule set and set it to Active.

Testing the solution end-to-end

Create a small file and generate a base64 encoding so that you can attach it to an SMTP message:

echo content >> demo.txt
cat demo.txt | base64 > demo64.txt
cat demo64.txt

Install openssl (which includes an SMTP client capability) using the following command:

sudo yum install openssl

Now run the SMTP client (openssl is used for the proof of concept, be sure to complete the steps in the workshop lab instructions first):

openssl s_client -crlf -quiet -starttls smtp -connect email-smtp.<aws-region>.amazonaws.com:587

and feed in the commands (replacing the brackets [] and everything between them) to send the SMTP message with the attachment you created.

EHLO amazonses.com
AUTH LOGIN
[base64 encoded SMTP user name]
[base64 encoded SMTP password]
MAIL FROM:[VERIFIED EMAIL IN SES]
RCPT TO:[VERIFIED EMAIL WITH SES RECEIPT RULE]
DATA
Subject: Demo from openssl
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
 boundary="XXXXboundary text"

This is a multipart message in MIME format.

--XXXXboundary text
Content-Type: text/plain

Line1:This is a Test email sent to coded list of email addresses using the Amazon SES SMTP interface from openssl SMTP client.
Line2:Email_Rxers_Code:[ANYUSER1@DOMAIN_A,ANYUSER2@DOMAIN_B,ANYUSERX@DOMAIN_Y]:Email_Rxers_Code:
Line3:Last line.

--XXXXboundary text
Content-Type: text/plain;
Content-Transfer-Encoding: Base64
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="demo64.txt"
Y29udGVudAo=
--XXXXboundary text
.
QUIT

Note: For base64 SMTP username and password above, use values obtained in Set up the SES SMTP interface, step 1. So for example, if the username is AKZB3LJAF5TQQRRPQZO1, then you can obtain base64 encoded value using following command:

echo -n AKZB3LJAF5TQQRRPQZO1 |base64
QUtaQjNMSkFGNVRRUVJSUFFaTzE=

This makes base64 encoded value QUtaQjNMSkFGNVRRUVJSUFFaTzE= Repeat same process for SMTP username and password values in the example above.

The openssl command should result in successful SMTP authentication and send. You should receive an email that looks like this:

Optimizing Security of the Solution

Do not share DNS credentials. Unauthorized access can lead to domain control, potential denial of service, and AWS charges. Restrict access to authorized personnel only.
Do not set the SENDER_EMAIL environment variable to the email address associated with the receipt rule. This address is a closely guarded secret, known only to administrators, and should be changed frequently.
Review access to your code repository regularly to ensure there are no unauthorized changes to your code base.
Utilize Permissions Boundaries to restrict the actions permitted by an IAM user or role.

Cleanup

To cleanup, start by navigating to Amazon SES Email receiving in AWS console, and setting the rule set to Inactive.

Once completed, delete the stack:

cdk destroy

Cleanup AWS SES Access Credentials

In Amazon SES Console, select Manage existing SMTP credentials, select the username for which credentials were created in Set up the SES SMTP interface above, navigate to the Security credentials tab and in the Access keys section, select Action -> Delete to delete AWS SES access credentials.

Troubleshooting

If you are not receiving the email or email is not being sent correctly there are a number of common causes of these errors:

HTTP Error 554 Message rejected email address is not verified. The following identities failed the check in region :
- This means that you have attempted to send an email from address that has not been verified.
- Please, ensure that the “MAIL FROM:[VERIFIED EMAIL IN SES]” email address sent via openssl matches the SenderEmail=<verified sender email> email address used in cdk deploy.
- Also make sure this email address was used in Verify the sender email address step.
Email is not being delivered/forwarded
- The incoming S3 bucket under the incoming prefix, contains file called AMAZON_SES_SETUP_NOTIFICATION. This means that MX record of the domain setup is missing. Please, validate that the MX record (step 2) of Verify your email domain with Amazon SES to receive emails section is fully configured.
- Please ensure after deploying the Amazon SES solution, the created rule set was made active by navigating to Amazon SES Email receiving in AWS console, and set it to Active.
- This may mean that the destination email address has bounced. Please, navigate to Amazon SES Suppression list in AWS console ensure that recipient’s email is not in the suppression list. If it is listed, you can see the reason in the “Suppression reason” column. There you may either manually remove from the suppression list or if the recipient email is not valid, consider using a different recipient email address.

AWS Legal Disclaimer: Sample code, software libraries, command line tools, proofs of concept, templates, or other related technology are provided as AWS Content or Third-Party Content under the AWS Customer Agreement, or the relevant written agreement between you and AWS (whichever applies). You should not use this AWS Content or Third-Party Content in your production accounts, or on production or other critical data. You are responsible for testing, securing, and optimizing the AWS Content or Third-Party Content, such as sample code, as appropriate for production grade use based on your specific quality control practices and standards. Deploying AWS Content or Third-Party Content may incur AWS charges for creating or using AWS chargeable resources, such as running Amazon EC2 instances or using Amazon S3 storage.

About the Authors

Tarek Soliman

Tarek is a Senior Solutions Architect at AWS. His background is in Software Engineering with a focus on distributed systems. He is passionate about diving into customer problems and solving them. He also enjoys building things using software, woodworking, and hobby electronics.

Dave Spencer

Dave is a Senior Solutions Architect at AWS. His background is in cloud solutions architecture, Infrastructure as Code (Iac), systems engineering, and embedded systems programming. Dave’s passion is developing partnerships with Department of Defense customers to maximize technology investments and realize their strategic vision.

Ayman Ishimwe

Ayman is a Solutions Architect at AWS based in Seattle, Washington. He holds a Master’s degree in Software Engineering and IT from Oakland University. With prior experience in software development, specifically in building microservices for distributed web applications, he is passionate about helping customers build robust and scalable solutions on AWS cloud services following best practices.

Dmytro Protsiv

Dmytro is a Cloud Applications Architect for with Amazon Web Services. He is passionate about helping customers to solve their business challenges around application modernization.

Stacy Conant

Stacy is a Solutions Architect working with DoD and US Navy customers. She enjoys helping customers understand how to harness big data and working on data analytics solutions. On the weekends, you can find Stacy crocheting, reading Harry Potter (again), playing with her dogs and cooking with her husband.

An introduction to Amazon WorkMail Audit Logging

2024-04-09 Zip Zieper

Post Syndicated from Zip Zieper original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/an-introduction-to-amazon-workmail-audit-logging/

Amazon WorkMail’s new audit logging capability equips email system administrators with powerful visibility into mailbox activities and system events across their organization. As announced in our recent “What’s New” post, this feature enables the comprehensive capture and delivery of critical email data, empowering administrators to monitor, analyze, and maintain compliance.

With audit logging, WorkMail records a wide range of events, including metadata about messages sent, received, and failed login attempts, and configuration changes. Administrators have the option to deliver these audit logs to their preferred AWS services, such as Amazon Simple Storage System (S3) for long-term storage, Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose for real-time data streaming, or Amazon CloudWatch Logs for centralized log management. Additionally, standard CloudWatch metrics on audit logs provide deep insights into the usage and health of WorkMail mailboxes within the organization.

By leveraging Amazon WorkMail’s audit logging capabilities, enterprises have the ability to strengthen their security posture, fulfill regulatory requirements, and gain critical visibility into the email activities that underpin their daily operations. This post will explore the technical details and practical use cases of this powerful new feature.

In this blog, you will learn how to configure your WorkMail organization to send email audit logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs, Amazon S3, and Amazon Data Firehose . We’ll also provide examples that show how to monitor access to your Amazon WorkMail Organization’s mailboxes by querying the logs via CloudWatch Log Insights.

Email security

Imagine you are the email administrator for a biotech company, and you’ve received a report about spam complaints coming from your company’s email system. When you investigate, you learn these complaints point to unauthorized emails originating from several of your company’s mailboxes. One or more of your company’s email accounts may have been compromised by a hacker. You’ll need to determine the specific mailboxes involved, understand who has access to those mailboxes, and how the mailboxes have been accessed. This will be useful in identifying mailboxes with multiple failed logins or unfamiliar IP access, which can indicate unauthorized attempts or hacking. To identify the cause of the security breach, you require access to detailed audit logs and familiar tools to analyze extensive log data and locate the root of your issues.

Amazon WorkMail Audit Logging

Amazon WorkMail is a secure, managed business email service that hosts millions of mailboxes globally. WorkMail features robust audit logging capabilities, equipping IT administrators and security experts with in-depth analysis of mailbox usage patterns. Audit logging provides detailed insights into user activities within WorkMail. Organizations can detect potential security vulnerabilities by utilizing audit logs. These logs document user logins, access permissions, and other critical activities. WorkMail audit logging facilitates compliance with various regulatory requirements, providing a clear audit trail of data privacy and security. WorkMail’s audit logs are crucial for maintaining the integrity, confidentiality, and reliability of your organization’s email system.

Understanding WorkMail Audit Logging

Amazon WorkMail’s audit logging feature provides you with the data you need to have a thorough understanding of your email mailbox activities. By sending detailed logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs, Amazon S3, and Amazon Data Firehose, administrators can identify mailbox access issues, track access by IP addresses, and review mailbox data movements or deletions using familiar tools. It is also possible to configure multiple destinations for each log to meet the needs of a variety of use cases, including compliance archiving.

WorkMail offers four audit logs:

ACCESS CONTROL LOGS – These logs record evaluations of access control rules, noting whether access to the endpoint was granted or denied in accordance with the configured rules;
AUTHENTICATION LOGS – These logs capture details of login activities, chronicling both successful and failed authentication attempts;
AVAILABILITY PROVIDER LOGS – These logs document the use of the Availability Providers feature, tracking its operational status and interactions feature;
MAILBOX ACCESS LOGS – Logs in this category record each attempt to access mailboxes within the WorkMail Organization, providing a detailed account of credential and protocol access patterns.

Once audit logging is enabled, alerts can be configured to warn of authentication or access anomalies that surpass predetermined thresholds. JSON formatting allows for advanced processing and analysis of audit logs by third party tools. Audit logging stores all interactions with the exception of web mail client authentication metrics.

WorkMail audit logging in action

Below are two examples that show how WorkMail’s audit logging can be used to investigate unauthorized login attempts, and diagnose a misconfigured email client. In both examples, we’ll use WorkMail’s Mailbox Access Control Logs and query the mailbox access control logs in CloudWatch Log Insights.

In our first example, we’re looking for unsuccessful login attempts in a target timeframe. In CloudWatch Log Insights we run this query:

fields user, source_ip, protocol, auth_successful, auth_failed_reason | filter auth_successful = 0

CloudWatch Log Insights returns all records in the timeframe, providing auth_succesful = 0 (false) and auth_failed_reason = Invalid username or password. We also see the source_ip, which we may decide to block in a WorkMail access control rule, or any other network security system.

Mailbox Access Control Log – an unsuccessful login attempt

In this next example, consider a WorkMail organization that has elected to block the IMAP protocol using a WorkMail access control rule (below):

WorkMail Access Control Rule blocking IMAP

WorkMail Access Control Rule – block IMAP protocol

Because some email clients use IMAP by default, occasionally new users in this example organization are denied access to email due to an incorrectly configured email client. Using WorkMail’s mailbox access control logs in CloudWatch Log Insights we run this query:

fields user_id, source_ip, protocol, rule_id, access_granted | filter access_granted = 0

And we see the user’s attempt to access their email inbox via IMAP has been denied by the access control rule_id (below):

WorkMail Access Control logs – IMAP blocked by access rule

Conclusion

Amazon WorkMail’s audit logging feature offers comprehensive view of your organization’s email activities. Four different logs provide visibility into access controls, authentication attempts, interactions with external systems, and mailbox activities. It provides flexible log delivery through native integration with AWS services and tools. Enabling WorkMail’s audit logging capabilities helps administrators meet compliance requirements and enhances the overall security and reliability of their email system.

To learn more about audit logging on Amazon WorkMail, you may comment on this post (below), view the WorkMail documentation, or reach out to your AWS account team.

To learn more about Amazon WorkMail, or to create a no-cost 30-day test organization, see Amazon WorkMail.

About the Authors

Luis Miguel Flores dos Santos

Miguel is a Solutions Architect at AWS, boasting over a decade of expertise in solution architecture, encompassing both on-premises and cloud solutions. His focus lies on resilience, performance, and automation. Currently, he is delving into serverless computing. In his leisure time, he enjoys reading, riding motorcycles, and spending quality time with family and friends.

Andy Wong

Zip

Upgrade Your Email Tech Stack with Amazon SESv2 API

2024-03-15 Zip Zieper

Post Syndicated from Zip Zieper original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/upgrade-your-email-tech-stack-with-amazon-sesv2-api/

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is a cloud-based email sending service that helps businesses and developers send marketing and transactional emails. We introduced the SESv1 API in 2011 to provide developers with basic email sending capabilities through Amazon SES using HTTPS. In 2020, we introduced the redesigned Amazon SESv2 API, with new and updated features that make it easier and more efficient for developers to send email at scale.

This post will compare Amazon SESv1 API and Amazon SESv2 API and explain the advantages of transitioning your application code to the SESv2 API. We’ll also provide examples using the AWS Command-Line Interface (AWS CLI) that show the benefits of transitioning to the SESv2 API.

Amazon SESv1 API

The SESv1 API is a relatively simple API that provides basic functionality for sending and receiving emails. For over a decade, thousands of SES customers have used the SESv1 API to send billions of emails. Our customers’ developers routinely use the SESv1 APIs to verify email addresses, create rules, send emails, and customize bounce and complaint notifications. Our customers’ needs have become more advanced as the global email ecosystem has developed and matured. Unsurprisingly, we’ve received customer feedback requesting enhancements and new functionality within SES. To better support an expanding array of use cases and stay at the forefront of innovation, we developed the SESv2 APIs.

While the SESv1 API will continue to be supported, AWS is focused on advancing functionality through the SESv2 API. As new email sending capabilities are introduced, they will only be available through SESv2 API. Migrating to the SESv2 API provides customers with access to these, and future, optimizations and enhancements. Therefore, we encourage SES customers to consider the information in this blog, review their existing codebase, and migrate to SESv2 API in a timely manner.

Amazon SESv2 API

Released in 2020, the SESv2 API and SDK enable customers to build highly scalable and customized email applications with an expanded set of lightweight and easy to use API actions. Leveraging insights from current SES customers, the SESv2 API includes several new actions related to list and subscription management, the creation and management of dedicated IP pools, and updates to unsubscribe that address recent industry requirements.

One example of new functionality in SESv2 API is programmatic support for the SES Virtual Delivery Manager. Previously only addressable via the AWS console, VDM helps customers improve sending reputation and deliverability. SESv2 API includes vdmAttributes such as VdmEnabled and DashboardAttributes as well as vdmOptions. DashboardOptions and GaurdianOptions.

To improve developer efficiency and make the SESv2 API easier to use, we merged several SESv1 APIs into single commands. For example, in the SESv1 API you must make separate calls for createConfigurationSet, setReputationMetrics, setSendingEnabled, setTrackingOptions, and setDeliveryOption. In the SESv2 API, however, developers make a single call to createConfigurationSet and they can include trackingOptions, reputationOptions, sendingOptions, deliveryOptions. This can result in more concise code (see below).

SESv1-vs-SESv2

Another example of SESv2 API command consolidation is the GetIdentity action, which is a composite of SESv1 API’s GetIdentityVerificationAttributes, GetIdentityNotificationAttributes, GetCustomMailFromAttributes, GetDKIMAttributes, and GetIdentityPolicies. See SESv2 documentation for more details.

Why migrate to Amazon SESv2 API?

The SESv2 API offers an enhanced experience compared to the original SESv1 API. Compared to the SESv1 API, the SESv2 API provides a more modern interface and flexible options that make building scalable, high-volume email applications easier and more efficient. SESv2 enables rich email capabilities like template management, list subscription handling, and deliverability reporting. It provides developers with a more powerful and customizable set of tools with improved security measures to build and optimize inbox placement and reputation management. Taken as a whole, the SESv2 APIs provide an even stronger foundation for sending critical communications and campaign email messages effectively at a scale.

Migrating your applications to SESv2 API will benefit your email marketing and communication capabilities with:

New and Enhanced Features: Amazon SESv2 API includes new actions as well as enhancements that provide better functionality and improved email management. By moving to the latest version, you’ll be able to optimize your email sending process. A few examples include:
- Increase the maximum message size (including attachments) from 10Mb (SESv1) to 40Mb (SESv2) for both sending and receiving.
- Access key actions for the SES Virtual Deliverability Manager (VDM) which provides insights into your sending and delivery data. VDM provides near-realtime advice on how to fix the issues that are negatively affecting your delivery success rate and reputation.
- Meet Google & Yahoo’s June 2024 unsubscribe requirements with the SES v2 SendEmail action. For more information, see the “What’s New blog”
Future-proof Your Application: Avoid potential compatibility issues and disruptions by keeping your application up-to-date with the latest version of the Amazon SESv2 API via the AWS SDK.
Improve Usability and Developer Experience: Amazon SESv2 API is designed to be more user-friendly and consistent with other AWS services. It is a more intuitive API with better error handling, making it easier to develop, maintain, and troubleshoot your email sending applications.

Migrating to the latest SESv2 API and SDK positions customers for success in creating reliable and scalable email services for their businesses.

What does migration to the SESv2 API entail?

While SESv2 API builds on the v1 API, the v2 API actions don’t universally map exactly to the v1 API actions. Current SES customers that intend to migrate to SESv2 API will need to identify the SESv1 API actions in their code and plan to refactor for v2. When planning the migration, it is essential to consider several important considerations:

Customers with applications that receive email using SESv1 API’s CreateReceiptFilter, CreateReceiptRule or CreateReceiptRuleSet actions must continue using the SESv1 API client for these actions. SESv1 and SESv2 can be used in the same application, where needed.
We recommend all customers follow the security best practice of “least privilege” with their IAM policies. As such, customers may need to review and update their policies to include the new and modified API actions introduced in SESv2 before migrating. Taking the time to properly configure permissions ensures a seamless transition while maintaining a securely optimized level of access. See documentation.

Below is an example of an IAM policy with a user with limited allow privileges related to several SESv1 Identity actions only:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "VisualEditor0",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "ses:VerifyEmailIdentity",
                "ses:Deleteldentity",
                "ses:VerifyDomainDkim",
                "ses:ListIdentities",
                "ses:VerifyDomainIdentity"
            ],
            "Resource": "*"
        }
    ]
}

When updating to SESv2, you need to update this user’s permissions with the SESv2 actions shown below:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "VisualEditor0",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "ses:CreateEmailIdentity",
                "ses:DeleteEmailIdentity",
                "ses:GetEmailIdentity",
                "ses:ListEmailIdentities"
            ],
            "Resource": "*"
        }
    ]
}

Examples of SESv1 vs. SESv2 APIs

Let’s look at a three examples that compare the SESv1 API with the SESv2 API.

LIST APIs

When listing identities in SESv1 list API, you need to specify type which requires multiple calls to API to list all resources:

aws ses list-identities --identity-type Domain
{
    "Identities": [
        "example.com"
    ]
}

aws ses list-identities --identity-type EmailAddress
{
    "Identities": [
        "[email protected]",
        "[email protected]",
        "[email protected]"
    ]
}

With SESv2, you can simply call a single API. Additionally, SESv2 also provides extended feedback:

aws sesv2 list-email-identities
{
    "EmailIdentities": [
        {
            "IdentityType": "DOMAIN",
            "IdentityName": "example.com",
            "SendingEnabled": false,
            "VerificationStatus": "FAILED"
        },
        {
            "IdentityType": "EMAIL_ADDRESS",
            "IdentityName": "[email protected]",
            "SendingEnabled": true,
            "VerificationStatus": "SUCCESS"
        },
        {
            "IdentityType": "EMAIL_ADDRESS",
            "IdentityName": "[email protected]",
            "SendingEnabled": false,
            "VerificationStatus": "FAILED"
        },
        {
            "IdentityType": "EMAIL_ADDRESS",
            "IdentityName": "[email protected]",
            "SendingEnabled": true,
            "VerificationStatus": "SUCCESS"
        }
    ]
}

CREATE APIs

With SESv1, creating email addresses or domains requires calling two different APIs:

aws ses verify-email-identity --email-address [email protected]

aws ses verify-domain-dkim --domain example.com
{
    "DkimTokens": [
        "mwmzhwhcebfh5kvwv7zahdatahimucqi",
        "dmlozjwrdbrjfwothoh26x6izvyts7qx",
        "le5fy6pintdkbxg6gdoetgbrdvyp664v"
    ]
}

With SESv2, we build an abstraction so you can call a single API. Additionally, SESv2 provides more detailed responses and feedback:

aws sesv2 create-email-identity --email-identity [email protected]
{
    "IdentityType": "EMAIL_ADDRESS",
    "VerifiedForSendingStatus": false
}

aws sesv2 create-email-identity --email-identity example.com
{
    "IdentityType": "DOMAIN",
    "VerifiedForSendingStatus": false,
    "DkimAttributes": {
        "SigningEnabled": true,
        "Status": "NOT_STARTED",
        "Tokens": [
            "mwmzhwhcebfh5kvwv7zahdatahimucqi",
            "dmlozjwrdbrjfwothoh26x6izvyts7qx",
            "le5fy6pintdkbxg6gdoetgbrdvyp664v"
        ],
        "SigningAttributesOrigin": "AWS_SES",
        "NextSigningKeyLength": "RSA_2048_BIT",
        "CurrentSigningKeyLength": "RSA_2048_BIT",
        "LastKeyGenerationTimestamp": "2024-02-23T15:01:53.849000+00:00"
    }
}

DELETE APIs

When calling delete- with SESv1, SES returns 200 (or no response), even if the identity was previously deleted or doesn’t exist:

 aws ses delete-identity --identity example.com

SESv2 provides better error handling and responses when calling the delete API:

aws sesv2 delete-email-identity --email-identity example.com

An error occurred (NotFoundException) when calling the DeleteEmailIdentity operation: Email identity example.com does not exist.

Hands-on with SESv1 API vs. SESv2 API

Below are a few examples you can use to explore the differences between SESv1 API and the SESv2 API. To complete these exercises, you’ll need:

AWS Account (setup) with enough permission to interact with the SES service via the CLI
Upgrade to the latest version of the AWS CLI (aws-cli/2.15.27 or greater)
SES enabled, configured and properly sending emails
A recipient email address with which you can check inbound messages (if you’re in the SES Sandbox, this email must be verified email identity). In the following examples, replace [email protected] with the verified email identity.
Your preferred IDE with AWS credentials and necessary permissions (you can also use AWS CloudShell)

Open the AWS CLI (or AWS CloudShell) and:

Create a test directory called v1-v2-test.
Create the following (8) files in the v1-v2-test directory:

destination.json (replace [email protected] with the verified email identity):

{ 
    "ToAddresses": ["[email protected]"] 
}

ses-v1-message.json

{
   "Subject": {
       "Data": "SESv1 API email sent using the AWS CLI",
       "Charset": "UTF-8"
   },
   "Body": {
       "Text": {
           "Data": "This is the message body from SESv1 API in text format.",
           "Charset": "UTF-8"
       },
       "Html": {
           "Data": "This message body from SESv1 API, it contains HTML formatting. For example - you can include links: <a class=\"ulink\" href=\"http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide\" target=\"_blank\">Amazon SES Developer Guide</a>.",
           "Charset": "UTF-8"
       }
   }
}

ses-v1-raw-message.json (replace [email protected] with the verified email identity):

{
     "Data": "From: [email protected]\nTo: [email protected]\nSubject: Test email sent using the SESv1 API and the AWS CLI \nMIME-Version: 1.0\nContent-Type: text/plain\n\nThis is the message body from the SESv1 API SendRawEmail.\n\n"
}

ses-v1-template.json (replace [email protected] with the verified email identity):

{
  "Source":"SES Developer<[email protected]>",
  "Template": "my-template",
  "Destination": {
    "ToAddresses": [ "[email protected]"
    ]
  },
  "TemplateData": "{ \"name\":\"SESv1 Developer\", \"favoriteanimal\": \"alligator\" }"
}

my-template.json (replace [email protected] with the verified email identity):

{
  "Template": {
    "TemplateName": "my-template",
    "SubjectPart": "Greetings SES Developer, {{name}}!",
    "HtmlPart": "<h1>Hello {{name}},</h1><p>Your favorite animal is {{favoriteanimal}}.</p>",
    "TextPart": "Dear {{name}},\r\nYour favorite animal is {{favoriteanimal}}."
  }
}

ses-v2-simple.json (replace [email protected] with the verified email identity):

{
    "FromEmailAddress": "[email protected]",
    "Destination": {
        "ToAddresses": [
            "[email protected]"
        ]
    },
    "Content": {
        "Simple": {
            "Subject": {
                "Data": "SESv2 API email sent using the AWS CLI",
                "Charset": "utf-8"
            },
            "Body": {
                "Text": {
                    "Data": "SESv2 API email sent using the AWS CLI",
                    "Charset": "utf-8"
                }
            },
            "Headers": [
                {
                    "Name": "List-Unsubscribe",
                    "Value": "insert-list-unsubscribe-here"
                },
				{
                    "Name": "List-Unsubscribe-Post",
                    "Value": "List-Unsubscribe=One-Click"
                }
            ]
        }
    }
}

ses-v2-raw.json (replace [email protected] with the verified email identity):

{
     "FromEmailAddress": "[email protected]",
     "Destination": {
            "ToAddresses": [
                       "[email protected]"
              ]
       },
      "Content": {
             "Raw": {
                     "Data": "Subject: Test email sent using SESv2 API via the AWS CLI \nMIME-Version: 1.0\nContent-Type: text/plain\n\nThis is the message body from SendEmail Raw Content SESv2.\n\n"
              }
      }
}

ses-v2-tempate.json (replace [email protected] with the verified email identity):

{
     "FromEmailAddress": "[email protected]",
     "Destination": {
       "ToAddresses": [
         "[email protected]"
       ]
     },
     "Content": {
        "Template": {
          "TemplateName": "my-template",
          "TemplateData": "{ \"name\":\"SESv2 Developer\",\"favoriteanimal\":\"Dog\" }",
          "Headers": [
                {
                   "Name": "List-Unsubscribe",
                   "Value": "insert-list-unsubscribe-here"
                },
                {
                   "Name": "List-Unsubscribe-Post",
                   "Value": "List-Unsubscribe=One-Click"
                }
             ]
         }
     }
}

Perform the following commands using the SESv1 API:

send-email (simple):

In the CLI, (replace [email protected] with the verified email identity) run:

aws ses send-email --from [email protected] --destination file://destination.json --message file://ses-v1-message.json

The response will return a valid MessageID (signaling the action was successful). An email will be received by the verified email identity.

{
    "MessageId": "0100018dc7649400-Xx1x0000x-bcec-483a-b97c-123a4567890d-xxxxx"
}

send-raw-email:

In the CLI, run:

aws ses send-raw-email  --cli-binary-format raw-in-base64-out --raw-message file://ses-v1-raw-message.json

The response will return a valid MessageID (signaling the action was successful). An email will be received by the verified email identity.

{
   "MessageId": "0200018dc7649400-Xx1x1234x-bcec-483a-b97c-123a4567890d-
}

send templated mail:

In the CLI, run the following to create the template:

aws ses create-template  --cli-input-json file://my-template.json

In the CLI, run:

aws ses send-templated-email --cli-input-json file://ses-v1-template.json

The response will return a valid MessageID (signaling the action was successful). An email will be received by the verified email identity.

 {
    "MessageId": "0000018dc7649400-Xx1x1234x-bcec-483a-b97c-123a4567890d-xxxxx"
 }

Perform similar commands using the SESv2 API:

As mentioned above, customers who are using least privilege permissions with SESv1 API must first update their IAM policies before running the SESv2 API examples below. See documentation for more info.

As you can see from the .json files we created for SES v2 API (above), you can modify or remove sections from the .json files, based on the type of email content (simple, raw or templated) you want to send.

Please ensure you are using the latest version of the AWS CLI (aws-cli/2.15.27 or greater).

Send simple email

In the CLI, run:

aws sesv2 send-email --cli-input-json file://ses-v2-simple.json

The response will return a valid MessageID (signaling the action was successful). An email will be received by the verified email identity

{
    "MessageId": "0100018dc83ba7e0-7b3149d7-3616-49c2-92b6-00e7d574f567-000000"
}

Send raw email (note – if the only reason is to set custom headers, you don’t need to send raw email)

In the CLI, run:

aws sesv2 send-email --cli-binary-format raw-in-base64-out --cli-input-json file://ses-v2-raw.json

The response will return a valid MessageID (signaling the action was successful). An email will be received by the verified email identity.

{
    "MessageId": "0100018dc877bde5-fdff0df3-838e-4f51-8582-a05237daecc7-000000"
}

Send templated email

In the CLI, run:

aws sesv2 send-email --cli-input-json file://ses-v2-tempate.json

The response will return a valid MessageID (signaling the action was successful). An email will be received by the verified email identity.

{
    "MessageId": "0100018dc87fe72c-f2c547a1-2325-4be4-bf78-b91d6648cd12-000000"
}

Migrating your application code to SESv2 API

As you can see from the examples above, SESv2 API shares much of its syntax and actions with the SESv1 API. As a result, most customers have found they can readily evaluate, identify and migrate their application code base in a relatively short period of time. However, it’s important to note that while the process is generally straightforward, there may be some nuances and differences to consider depending on your specific use case and programming language.

Regardless of the language, you’ll need anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks to:

Update your code to use SESv2 Client and change API signature and request parameters
Update permissions / policies to reflect SESv2 API requirements
Test your migrated code to ensure that it functions correctly with the SESv2 API
Stage, test
Deploy

Summary

As we’ve described in this post, Amazon SES customers that migrate to the SESv2 API will benefit from updated capabilities, a more user-friendly and intuitive API, better error handling and improved deliverability controls. The SESv2 API also provide for compliance with the industry’s upcoming unsubscribe header requirements, more flexible subscription-list management, and support for larger attachments. Taken collectively, these improvements make it even easier for customers to develop, maintain, and troubleshoot their email sending applications with Amazon Simple Email Service. For these, and future reasons, we recommend SES customers migrate their existing applications to the SESv2 API immediately.

For more information regarding the SESv2 APIs, comment on this post, reach out to your AWS account team, or consult the AWS SESv2 API documentation:

About the Authors

Zip

Zip is an Amazon Pinpoint and Amazon Simple Email Service Sr. Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS. Outside of work he enjoys time with his family, cooking, mountain biking and plogging.

Vinay Ujjini

Vinay is an Amazon Pinpoint and Amazon Simple Email Service Worldwide Principal Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS. He has been solving customer’s omni-channel challenges for over 15 years. He is an avid sports enthusiast and in his spare time, enjoys playing tennis and cricket.

Dmitrijs Lobanovskis

Dmitrijs is a Software Engineer for Amazon Simple Email service. When not working, he enjoys traveling, hiking and going to the gym.

Building a generative AI Marketing Portal on AWS

2024-01-09 Tristan Nguyen

Post Syndicated from Tristan Nguyen original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/building-a-generative-ai-marketing-portal-on-aws/

Introduction

In the preceding entries of this series, we examined the transformative impact of Generative AI on marketing strategies in “Building Generative AI into Marketing Strategies: A Primer” and delved into the intricacies of Prompt Engineering to enhance the creation of marketing content with services such as Amazon Bedrock in “From Prompt Engineering to Auto Prompt Optimisation”. We also explored the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) to refine prompts for more effective customer engagement.

Continuing this exploration, we will articulate how Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Personalize, and Amazon Pinpoint can be leveraged to construct a marketer portal that not only facilitates AI-driven content generation but also personalizes and distributes this content effectively. The aim is to provide a clear blueprint for deploying a system that crafts, personalizes, and distributes marketing content efficiently. This blog will guide you through the deployment process, underlining the real-world utility of these services in optimizing marketing workflows. Through use cases and a code demonstration, we’ll see these technologies in action, offering a hands-on perspective on enhancing your marketing pipeline with AI-driven solutions.

The Challenge with Content Generation in Marketing

Many companies struggle to streamline their marketing operations effectively, facing hurdles at various stages of the marketing operations pipeline. Below, we list the challenges at three main stages of the pipeline: content generation, content personalization, and content distribution.

Content Generation

Creating high-quality, engaging content is often easier said than done. Companies need to invest in skilled copywriters or content creators who understand not just the product but also the target audience. Even with the right talent, the process can be time-consuming and costly. Moreover, generating content at scale while maintaining quality and compliance to industry regulations is the key blocker for many companies considering adopting generative AI technologies in production environments.

Content Personalization

Once the content is created, the next hurdle is personalization. In today’s digital age, generic content rarely captures attention. Customers expect content tailored to their needs, preferences, and behaviors. However, personalizing content is not straightforward. It requires a deep understanding of customer data, which often resides in siloed databases, making it difficult to create a 360-degree view of the customer.

Content Distribution

Finally, even the most captivating, personalized content is ineffective if it doesn’t reach the right audience at the right time. Companies often grapple with choosing the appropriate channels for content distribution, be it email, social media, or mobile notifications. Additionally, ensuring that the content complies with various regulations and doesn’t end up in spam folders adds another layer of complexity to the distribution phase. Sending at scale requires paying attention to deliverability, security and reliability which often poses significant challenges to marketers.

By addressing these challenges, companies can significantly improve their marketing operations and empower their marketers to be more effective. But how can this be achieved efficiently and at scale? The answer lies in leveraging the power of Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Personalize, and Amazon Pinpoint, as we will explore in the following solution.

The Solution In Action

Before we dive into the details of the implementation, let’s take a look at the end result through the linked demo video.

Use Case 1: Banking/Financial Services Industry

You are a relationship manager working in the Consumer Banking department of a fictitious company called AnyCompany Bank. You are assigned a group of customers and would like to send out personalized and targeted communications to the channel of choice to every members of this group of customer.

Behind the scene, the marketer is utilizing Amazon Pinpoint to create the segment of customers they would like to target. The customers’ information and the marketer’s prompt are then fed into Amazon Bedrock to generate the marketing content, which is then sent to the customer via SMS and email using Amazon Pinpoint.

In the Prompt Iterator page, you can employ a process called “prompt engineering” to further optimize your prompt to maximize the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Please refer to this blog on the process behind engineering the prompt as well as how to apply an additional LLM model for auto-prompting. To get started, simply copy the sample banking prompt which has gone through the prompt engineering process in this page.
Next, you can either upload your customer group by uploading a .csv file (through “Importing a Segment”) or specify a customer group using pre-defined filter criteria based on your current customer database using Amazon Pinpoint.

UseCase1Segment

E.g.: The screenshot shows a sample filtered segment named ManagementOrRetired that only filters to customers who are management or retirees.

Once done, you can log into the marketer portal and choose the relevant segment that you’ve just created within the Amazon Pinpoint console.

PinpointSegment

You can then preview the customers and their information stored in your Amazon Pinpoint’s customer database. Once satisfied, we’re ready to start generating content for those customers!
Click on 1:1 Content Generator tab, your content is automatically generated for your first customer. Here, you can cycle through your customers one by one, and depending on the customer’s preferred language and channel, an email or SMS in the preferred language is automatically generated for them.
- Generated SMS in English

PostiveSMS

- A negative example showing proper prompt-engineering at work to moderate content. This happens if we try to insert data that does not make sense for the marketing content generator to output. In this case, the marketing generator refuses to output (justifiably) an advertisement for a 6-year-old on a secured instalment loan.

NegativeSMS

Finally, we choose to send the generated content via Amazon Pinpoint by clicking on “Send with Amazon Pinpoint”. In the back end, Amazon Pinpoint will orchestrate the sending of the email/SMS through the appropriate channels.
- Alternatively, if the auto-generated content still did not meet your needs and you want to generate another draft, you can Disagree and try again.

Use Case 2: Travel & Hospitality

You are a marketing executive that’s working for an online air ticketing agency. You’ve been tasked to promote a specific flight from Singapore to Hong Kong for AnyCompany airline. You’d first like to identify which customers would be prime candidates to promote this flight leg to and then send out hyper-personalized message to them.

Behind the scene, instead of using Amazon Pinpoint to manually define the segment, the marketer in this case is leveraging AIML capabilities of Amazon Personalize to define the best group of customers to recommend the specific flight leg to them. Similar to the above use case, the customers’ information and LLM prompt are fed into the Amazon Bedrock, which generates the marketing content that is eventually sent out via Amazon Pinpoint.

Similar to the above use case, you’d need to go through a prompt engineering process to ensure that the content the LLM model is generating will be relevant and safe for use. To get started quickly, go to the Prompt Iterator page, you can use the sample airlines prompt and iterate from there.
Your company offers many different flight legs, aggregated from many different carriers. You first filter down to the flight leg that you want to promote using the Filters on the left. In this case, we are filtering for flights originating from Singapore (SRCCity) and going to Hong Kong (DSTCity), operated by AnyCompany Airlines.

PersonalizeInstructions

Now, let’s choose the number of customers that you’d like to generate. Once satisfied, you choose to start the batch segmentation job.
In the background, Amazon Personalize generates a group of customers that are most likely to be interested in this flight leg based on past interactions with similar flight itineraries.
Once the segmentation job is finished as shown, you can fetch the recommended group of customers and start generating content for them immediately, similar to the first use case.

Setup instructions

The setup instructions and deployment details can be found in the GitHub link.

Conclusion

In this blog, we’ve explored the transformative potential of integrating Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Personalize, and Amazon Pinpoint to address the common challenges in marketing operations. By automating the content generation with Amazon Bedrock, personalizing at scale with Amazon Personalize, and ensuring precise content distribution with Amazon Pinpoint, companies can not only streamline their marketing processes but also elevate the customer experience.

The benefits are clear: time-saving through automation, increased operational efficiency, and enhanced customer satisfaction through personalized engagement. This integrated solution empowers marketers to focus on strategy and creativity, leaving the heavy lifting to AWS’s robust AI and ML services.

For those ready to take the next step, we’ve provided a comprehensive guide and resources to implement this solution. By following the setup instructions and leveraging the provided prompts as a starting point, you can deploy this solution and begin customizing the marketer portal to your business’ needs.

Call to Action

Don’t let the challenges of content generation, personalization, and distribution hold back your marketing potential. Deploy the Generative AI Marketer Portal today, adapt it to your specific needs, and watch as your marketing operations transform. For a hands-on start and to see this solution in action, visit the GitHub repository for detailed setup instructions.

Have a question? Share your experiences or leave your questions in the comment section.

About the Authors

Tristan (Tri) Nguyen

Tristan (Tri) Nguyen is an Amazon Pinpoint and Amazon Simple Email Service Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS. At work, he specializes in technical implementation of communications services in enterprise systems and architecture/solutions design. In his spare time, he enjoys chess, rock climbing, hiking and triathlon.

Philipp Kaindl

Philipp Kaindl is a Senior Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Solutions Architect at AWS. With a background in data science and
mechanical engineering his focus is on empowering customers to create lasting business impact with the help of AI. Outside of work, Philipp enjoys tinkering with 3D printers, sailing and hiking.

Bruno Giorgini

An Overview of Bulk Sender Changes at Yahoo/Gmail

2023-11-09 Dustin Taylor

Post Syndicated from Dustin Taylor original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/an-overview-of-bulk-sender-changes-at-yahoo-gmail/

In a move to safeguard user inboxes, Gmail and Yahoo Mail announced a new set of requirements for senders effective from February 2024. Let’s delve into the specifics and what Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) customers need to do to comply with these requirements.

What are the new email sender requirements?

The new requirements include long-standing best practices that all email senders should adhere to in order to achieve good deliverability with mailbox providers. What’s new is that Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and other mailbox providers will require alignment with these best practices for those who send bulk messages over 5000 per day or if a significant number of recipients indicate the mail as spam.

The requirements can be distilled into 3 categories: 1) stricter adherence to domain authentication, 2) give recipients an easy way to unsubscribe from bulk mail, and 3) monitoring spam complaint rates and keeping them under a 0.3% threshold.

* This blog was originally published in November 2023, and updated on January 12, 2024 to clarify timelines, and to provide links to additional resources.

1. Domain authentication

Mailbox providers will require domain-aligned authentication with DKIM and SPF, and they will be enforcing DMARC policies for the domain used in the From header of messages. For example, gmail.com will be publishing a quarantine DMARC policy, which means that unauthorized messages claiming to be from Gmail will be sent to Junk folders.

Read Amazon SES: Email Authentication and Getting Value out of Your DMARC Policy to gain a deeper understanding of SPF and DKIM domain-alignment and maximize the value from your domain’s DMARC policy.

The following steps outline how Amazon SES customers can adhere to the domain authentication requirements:

Adopt domain identities: Amazon SES customers who currently rely primarily on email address identities will need to adopt verified domain identities to achieve better deliverability with mailbox providers. By using a verified domain identity with SES, your messages will have a domain-aligned DKIM signature.

Not sure what domain to use? Read Choosing the Right Domain for Optimal Deliverability with Amazon SES for additional best practice guidance regarding sending authenticated email.

Configure a Custom MAIL FROM domain: To further align with best practices, SES customers should also configure a custom MAIL FROM domain so that SPF is domain-aligned.

The table below illustrates the three scenarios based on the type of identity you use with Amazon SES

Scenarios using example.com in the From header	DKIM authenticated identifier	SPF authenticated identifier	DMARC authentication results
[email protected] as a verified email address identity	amazonses.com	email.amazonses.com	Fail – DMARC analysis fails as the sending domain does not have a DKIM signature or SPF record that matches.
example.com as a verified domain identity	example.com	email.amazonses.com	Success – DKIM signature aligns with sending domain which will cause DMARC checks to pass.
example.com as a verified domain identity, and bounce.example.com as a custom MAIL FROM domain	example.com	bounce.example.com	Success – DKIM and SPF are aligned with sending domain.

Figure 1: Three scenarios based on the type of identity used with Amazon SES. Using a verified domain identity and configuring a custom MAIL FROM domain will result in both DKIM and SPF being aligned to the From header domain’s DMARC policy.

Be strategic with subdomains: Amazon SES customers should consider a strategic approach to the domains and subdomains used in the From header for different email sending use cases. For example, use the marketing.example.com verified domain identity for sending marketing mail, and use the receipts.example.com verified domain identity to send transactional mail.

Why? Marketing messages may have higher spam complaint rates and would need to adhere to the bulk sender requirements, but transactional mail, such as purchase receipts, would not necessarily have spam complaints high enough to be classified as bulk mail.

Publish DMARC policies: Publish a DMARC policy for your domain(s). The domain you use in the From header of messages needs to have a policy by setting the p= tag in the domain’s DMARC policy in DNS. The policy can be set to “p=none” to adhere to the bulk sending requirements and can later be changed to quarantine or reject when you have ensured all email using the domain is authenticated with DKIM or SPF domain-aligned authenticated identifiers.

2. Set up an easy unsubscribe for email recipients

Bulk senders are expected to include a mechanism to unsubscribe by adding an easy to find link within the message. The February 2024 mailbox provider rules will require senders to additionally add one-click unsubscribe headers as defined by RFC 2369 and RFC 8058. These headers make it easier for recipients to unsubscribe, which reduces the rate at which recipients will complain by marking messages as spam.

There are many factors that could result in your messages being classified as bulk by any mailbox provider. Volume over 5000 per day is one factor, but the primary factor that mailbox providers use is in whether the recipient actually wants to receive the mail.

If you aren’t sure if your mail is considered bulk, monitor your spam complaint rates. If the complaint rates are high or growing, it is a sign that you should offer an easy way for recipients to unsubscribe.

How to adhere to the easy unsubscribe requirement

The following steps outline how Amazon SES customers can adhere to the easy unsubscribe requirement:

Add one-click unsubscribe headers to the messages you send: Amazon SES customers sending bulk or potentially unwanted messages will need to implement an easy way for recipients to unsubscribe, which they can do using the SES subscription management feature.

Mailbox providers are requiring that large senders give recipients the ability to unsubscribe from bulk email in one click using the one-click unsubscribe header, however it is acceptable for the unsubscribe link in the message to direct the recipient to a landing page for the recipient to confirm their opt-out preferences.

To set up one-click unsubscribe without using the SES subscription management feature, include both of these headers in outgoing messages:

List-Unsubscribe-Post: List-Unsubscribe=One-Click
List-Unsubscribe: <https://example.com/unsubscribe/example>

When a recipient unsubscribes using one-click, you receive this POST request:

POST /unsubscribe/example HTTP/1.1 Host: example.com Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded Content-Length: 26 List-Unsubscribe=One-Click

Gmail’s FAQ and Yahoo’s FAQ both clarify that the one-click unsubscribe requirement will not be enforced until June 2024 as long as the bulk sender has a functional unsubscribe link clearly visible in the footer of each message.

Honor unsubscribe requests within 2 days: Verify that your unsubscribe process immediately removes the recipient from receiving similar future messages. Mailbox providers are requiring that bulk senders give recipients the ability to unsubscribe from email in one click, and that the senders process unsubscribe requests within two days.

If you adopt the SES subscription management feature, make sure you integrate the recipient opt-out preferences with the source of your email sending lists. If you implement your own one-click unsubscribe (for example, using Amazon API Gateway and an AWS Lambda function), make sure it designed to suppress sending to email addresses in your source email lists.

Review your email list building practices: Ensure responsible email practices by refraining from purchasing email lists, safeguarding opt-in forms from bot abuse, verifying recipients’ preferences through confirmation messages, and abstaining from automatically enrolling recipients in categories that were not requested.

Having good list opt-in hygiene is the best way to ensure that you don’t have high spam complaint rates before you adhere to the new required best practices. To learn more, read What is a Spam Trap, and Why You Should Care.

3. Monitor spam rates

Mailbox providers will require that all senders keep spam complaint rates below 0.3% to avoid having their email treated as spam by the mailbox provider. The following steps outline how Amazon SES customers can meet the spam complaint rate requirement:

Enroll with Google Postmaster Tools: Amazon SES customers should enroll with Google Postmaster Tools to monitor their spam complaint rates for Gmail recipients.

Gmail recommends spam complaint rates stay below 0.1%. If you send to a mix of Gmail recipients and recipients on other mailbox providers, the spam complaint rates reported by Gmail’s Postmaster Tools are a good indicator of your spam complaint rates at mailbox providers who don’t let you view metrics.

Enable Amazon SES Virtual Deliverability Manager: Enable Virtual Deliverability Manager (VDM) in your Amazon SES account. Customers can use VDM to monitor bounce and complaint rates for many mailbox providers. Amazon SES recommends customers to monitor reputation metrics and stay below a 0.1% complaint rate.

Segregate and secure your sending using configuration sets: In addition to segregating sending use cases by domain, Amazon SES customers should use configuration sets for each sending use case.

Using configuration sets will allow you to monitor your sending activity and implement restrictions with more granularity. You can even pause the sending of a configuration set automatically if spam complaint rates exceed your tolerance threshold.

Conclusion

These changes are planned for February 2024, but be aware that the exact timing and methods used by each mailbox provider may vary. If you experience any deliverability issues with any mailbox provider prior to February, it is in your best interest to adhere to these required best practices as a first step.

We hope that this blog clarifies any areas of confusion on this change and provides you with the information you need to be prepared for February 2024. Happy sending!

Helpful links:

Gmail Announcement: https://blog.google/products/gmail/gmail-security-authentication-spam-protection/
Yahoo Announcement: https://blog.postmaster.yahooinc.com/post/730172167494483968/more-secure-less-spam
DMARC Policy Blog: Amazon SES: Email Authentication and Getting Value out of Your DMARC Policy
Choosing the Right Domain Blog: Choosing the Right Domain for Optimal Deliverability with Amazon SES

Amazon SES: Email Authentication and Getting Value out of Your DMARC Policy

2023-10-03 Bruno Giorgini

Post Syndicated from Bruno Giorgini original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/email-authenctication-dmarc-policy/

Amazon SES: Email Authentication and Getting Value out of Your DMARC Policy

Introduction

For enterprises of all sizes, email is a critical piece of infrastructure that supports large volumes of communication. To enhance the security and trustworthiness of email communication, many organizations turn to email sending providers (ESPs) like Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES). These ESPs allow users to send authenticated emails from their domains, employing industry-standard protocols such as the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). Messages authenticated with SPF or DKIM will successfully pass your domain’s Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) policy. This blog post will focus on the DMARC policy enforcement mechanism. The blog will explore some of the reasons why email may fail DMARC policy evaluation and propose solutions to fix any failures that you identify. For an introduction to DMARC and how to carefully choose your email sending domain identity, you can refer to Choosing the Right Domain for Optimal Deliverability with Amazon SES The relationship between DMARC compliance and email deliverability rates is crucial for organizations aiming to maintain a positive sender reputation and ensure successful email delivery. There are many advantages when organizations have this correctly setup, these include:

Improved Email Deliverability
Reduction in Email Spoofing and Phishing
Positive Sender Reputation
Reduced Risk of Email Marked as Spam
Better Email Engagement Metrics
Enhanced Brand Reputation

With this foundation, let’s explore the intricacies of DMARC and how it can benefit your organization’s email communication.

What is DMARC?

DMARC is a mechanism for domain owners to advertise SPF and DKIM protection and to tell receivers how to act if those authentication methods fail. The domain’s DMARC policy protects your domain from third parties attempting to spoof the domain in the “From” header of emails. Malicious email messages that aim to send phishing attempts using your domain will be subject to DMARC policy evaluation, which may result in their quarantine or rejection by the email receiving organization. This stringent policy ensures that emails received by email recipients are genuinely from the claimed sending domain, thereby minimizing the risk of people falling victim to email-based scams. Domain owners publish DMARC policies as a TXT record in the domain’s _dmarc.<domain> DNS record. For example, if the domain used in the “From” header is example.com, then the domain’s DMARC policy would be located in a DNS TXT record named _dmarc.example.com. The DMARC policy can have one of three policy modes:

A typical DMARC deployment of an existing domain will start with publishing "p=none". A none policy means that the domain owner is in a monitoring phase; the domain owner is monitoring for messages that aren’t authenticated with SPF and DKIM and seeks to ensure all email is properly authenticated
When the domain owner is comfortable that all legitimate use cases are properly authenticated with SPF and/or DKIM, they may change the DMARC policy to "p=quarantine". A quarantine policy means that messages which fail to produce a domain-aligned authenticated identifier via SPF or DKIM will be quarantined by the mail receiving organization. The mail receiving organization may filter these messages into Junk folders, or take another action that they feel best protects their recipients.
Finally, domain owners who are confident that all of the legitimate messages using their domain are authenticated with SPF or DKIM, may change the DMARC policy to "p=reject". A reject policy means that messages which fail to produce a domain-aligned authenticated identifier via SPF or DKIM will be rejected by the mail receiving organization.

The following are examples of a TXT record that contains a DMARC policy, depending on the desired policy (the ‘p’ tag):

	Name	Type	Value
1	_dmarc.example.com	TXT	“v=DMARC1;p=reject;rua=mailto:[email protected]”
2	_dmarc.example.com	TXT	“v=DMARC1;p=quarantine;rua=mailto:[email protected]”
3	_dmarc.example.com	TXT	“v=DMARC1;p=none;rua=mailto:[email protected]”

Table 1 – Example DMARC policy

This policy tells email providers to apply the DMARC policy to messages that fail to produce a DKIM or SPF authenticated identifier that is aligned to the domain in the “From” header. Alignment means that one or both of the following occurs:

The messages pass the SPF policy for the MAIL FROM domain and the MAIL FROM domain is the same as the domain in the “From” header, or a subdomain. Reference Using a custom MAIL FROM domain to learn more about how to send SPF aligned messages with SES.
The messages have a DKIM signature signed by a public key in DNS at a location within the domain of the “From” header. Reference Authenticating Email with DKIM in Amazon SES to learn more about how to send DKIM aligned messages with SES.

DMARC reporting

The rua tag in the domain’s DMARC policy indicates the location to which mail receiving organizations should send aggregate reports about messages that pass or fail SPF and DKIM alignment. Domain owners analyze these reports to discover messages which are using the domain in the “From” header but are not properly authenticated with SPF or DKIM. The domain owner will attempt to ensure that all legitimate messages are authenticated through analysis of the DMARC aggregate reports over time. Mail receiving organizations which support sending DMARC reports typically send these aggregated reports once per day, although these practices differ from provider to provider.

What does a typical DMARC deployment look like?

A DMARC deployment is the process of:

Ensuring that all emails using the domain in the “From” header are authenticated with DKIM and SPF domain-aligned identifiers. Focus on DKIM as the primary means of authentication.
Publishing a DMARC policy (none, quarantine, or reject) for the domain that reflects how the domain owner would like mail receiving organizations to handle unauthenticated email claiming to be from their domain.

New domains and subdomains

Deploying a DMARC policy is easy for organizations that have created a new domain or subdomain for the purpose of a new email sending use case on SES; for example email marketing, transaction emails, or one-time pass codes (OTP). These domains can start with the "p=reject" DMARC enforcement policy because the policy will not affect existing email sending programs. This strict enforcement is to ensure that there is no unauthenticated use of the domain and its subdomains.

Existing domains

For existing domains, a DMARC deployment is an iterative process because the domain may have a history of email sending by one or multiple email sending programs. It is important to gain a complete understanding of how the domain and its subdomains are being used for email sending before publishing a restrictive DMARC policy (p=quarantine or p=reject) because doing so would affect any unauthenticated email sending programs using the domain in the “From” header of messages. To get started with the DMARC implementation, these are a few actions to take:

Publish a p=none DMARC policy (sometimes referred to as monitoring mode), and set the rua tag to the location in which you would like to receive aggregate reports.
Analyze the aggregate reports. Mail receiving organizations will send reports which contain information to determine if the domain, and its subdomains, are being used for sending email, and how the messages are (or are not) being authenticated with a DKIM or SPF domain-aligned identifier. An easy to use analysis tool is the Dmarcian XML to Human Converter.
Avoid prematurely publishing a “p=quarantine” or “p=reject” policy. Doing so may result in blocked or reduced delivery of legitimate messages of existing email sending programs.

The image below illustrates how DMARC will be applied to an email received by the email receiving server and actions taken based on the enforcement policy:

Figure 1 – DMARC Flow

How do SPF and DKIM cause DMARC policies to pass

When you start sending emails using Amazon SES, messages that you send through Amazon SES automatically use a subdomain of amazonses.com as the default MAIL FROM domain. SPF evaluators will see that these messages pass the SPF policy evaluation because the default MAIL FROM domain has a SPF policy which includes the IP addresses of the SES infrastructure that sent the message. SPF authentication will result in an “SPF=PASS” and the authenticated identifier is the domain of the MAIL FROM address. The published SPF record applies to every message that is sent using SES regardless of whether you are using a shared or dedicated IP address. The amazonses.com SPF record lists all shared and dedicated IP addresses, so it is inclusive of all potential IP addresses that may be involved with sending email as the MAIL FROM domain. You can use ‘dig’ to look up the IP addresses that SES will use to send email:

dig txt amazonses.com | grep "v=spf1" amazonses.com. 850 IN TXT "v=spf1 ip4:199.255.192.0/22 ip4:199.127.232.0/22 ip4:54.240.0.0/18 ip4:69.169.224.0/20 ip4:23.249.208.0/20 ip4:23.251.224.0/19 ip4:76.223.176.0/20 ip4:54.240.64.0/19 ip4:54.240.96.0/19 ip4:52.82.172.0/22 ip4:76.223.128.0/19 -all"

Custom MAIL FROM domains

It is best practice for customers to configure a custom MAIL FROM domain, and not use the default amazonses.com MAIL FROM domain. The custom MAIL FROM domain will always be a subdomain of the customer’s verified domain identity. Once you configure the MAIL FROM domain, messages sent using SES will continue to result in an “SPF=PASS” as it does with the default MAIL FROM domain. Additionally, DMARC authentication will result in “DMARC=PASS” because the MAIL FROM domain and the domain in the “From” header are in alignment. It’s important to understand that customers must use a custom MAIL FROM domain if they want “SPF=PASS” to result in a “DMARC=PASS”.

For example, an Amazon SES-verified example.com domain will have the custom MAIL FROM domain “bounce.example.com”. The configured SPF record will be:

dig txt bounce.example.com | grep "v=spf1" "v=spf1 include:amazonses.com ~all"

Note: The chosen MAIL FROM domain could be any sub-domain of your choice. If you have the same domain identity configured in multiple regions, then you should create region-specific custom MAIL FROM domains for each region. e.g. bounce-us-east-1.example.com and bounce-eu-west-2.example.com so that asynchronously bounced messages are delivered directly to the region from which the messages were sent.

DKIM results in DMARC pass

For customers that establish Amazon SES Domain verification using DKIM signatures, DKIM authentication will result in a DKIM=PASS, and DMARC authentication will result in “DMARC=PASS” because the domain that publishes the DKIM signature is aligned to the domain in the “From” header (the SES domain identity).

DKIM and SPF together

Email messages are fully authenticated when the messages pass both DKIM and SPF, and both DKIM and SPF authenticated identifiers are domain-aligned. If only DKIM is domain-aligned, then the messages will still pass the DMARC policy, even if the SPF “pass” is unaligned. Mail receivers will consider the full context of SPF and DKIM when determining how they will handle the disposition of the messages you send, so it is best to fully authenticate your messages whenever possible. Amazon SES has taken care of the heavy lifting of the email authentication process away from our customers, and so, establishing SPF, DKIM and DMARC authentication has been reduced to a few clicks which allows SES customers to get started easily and scale fast.

Why is DMARC failing?

There are scenarios when you may notice that messages fail DMARC, whether your messages are fully authenticated, or partially authenticated. The following are things that you should look out for:

Email Content Modification

Sometimes email content is modified during the delivery to the recipients’ mail servers. This modification could be as a result of a security device or anti-spam agent along the delivery path (for example: the message Subject may be modified with an “[EXTERNAL]” warning to recipients). The modified message invalidates the DKIM signature which causes a DKIM failure. Remember, the purpose of DKIM is to ensure that the content of an email has not been tampered with during the delivery process. If this happens, the DKIM authentication will fail with an authentication error similar to “DKIM-signature body hash not verified“.

Solutions:

If you control the full path that the email message will traverse from sender to recipient, ensure that no intermediary mail servers modify the email content in transit.
Ensure that you configure a custom MAIL FROM domain so that the messages have a domain-aligned SPF identifier.
Keep the DMARC policy in monitoring mode (p=none) until these issues are identified/solved.

Email Forwarding

Email Forwarding There are multiple scenarios in which a message may be forwarded, and they may result in both/either SPF and DKIM failing to produce a domain-aligned authenticated identifier. For SPF, it means that the forwarding mail server is not listed in the MAIL FROM domain’s SPF policy. It is best practice for a forwarding mail server to avoid SPF failures and assume responsibility of mail handling for the messages it forwards by rewriting the MAIL FROM address to be in the domain controlled by the forwarding server. Forwarding servers that do not rewrite the MAIL FROM address pose a risk of impersonation attacks and phishing. Do not add the IP addresses of forwarding servers to your MAIL FROM domain’s SPF policy unless you are in complete control of all sources of mail being forwarded through this infrastructure. For DKIM, it means that the messages are being modified in some way that causes DKIM signature validation failure (see Email Content Modification section above). A responsible forwarding server will rewrite the MAIL FROM domain so that the messages pass SPF with a non-aligned authenticated identifier. These servers will attempt to forward the message without alteration in order to preserve DKIM signatures, but that is sometimes challenging to do in practice. In this scenario, since the messages carry no domain-aligned authenticated identifier, the messages will fail the DMARC policy.

Solution:

Email forwarding is an expected type of failure of which you will see in the DMARC aggregate reports. The domain owner must weigh the risk of causing forwarded messages to be rejected against the risk of not publishing a reject DMARC policy. Reference 8.6. Interoperability Considerations. Forwarding servers that wish to forward messages that they know will result in a DMARC failure will commonly rewrite the “From” header address of messages it forwards so that the messages pass a DMARC policy for a domain that the forwarding server is responsible for. The way to identify forwarding servers that rewrite the “From” header in this situation is to publish “p=quarantine pct=0 t=y” in your domain’s DMARC policy before publishing “p=reject”.

Multiple email sending providers are sending using the same domain

Multiple email sending providers: There are situations where an organization will have multiple business units sending email using the same domain, and these business units may be using an email sending provider other than SES. If neither SPF nor DKIM is configured with domain-alignment for these email sending providers, you will see DMARC failures in the DMARC aggregate report.

Solution:

Analyze the DMARC aggregate reports to identify other email sending providers, track down the business units responsible for each email sending program, and follow the instructions offered by the email sending provider about how to configure SPF and DKIM to produce a domain-aligned authenticated identifier.

What does a DMARC aggregate report look like?

The following XML example shows the general format of a DMARC aggregate report that you will receive from participating email service providers.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> 
<feedback> 
  <report_metadata> 
    <org_name>email-service-provider-domain.com</org_name> 
    <email>[email protected]</email> 
    <extra_contact_info>https://email-service-provider-domain.com/> 
    <report_id>620501112281841510</report_id> 
    <date_range> 
      <begin>1685404800</begin> 
      <end>1685491199</end> 
    </date_range> 
  </report_metadata> 
  <policy_published> 
    <domain>example.com</domain>
    <adkim>r</adkim> 
    <aspf>r</aspf> 
    <p>none</p> 
    <sp>none</sp> 
    <pct>100</pct> 
  </policy_published> 
  <record> 
    <row> 
      <source_ip>192.0.2.10</source_ip>
      <count>1</count> 
      <policy_evaluated> 
        <disposition>none</disposition> 
        <dkim>pass</dkim> 
        <spf>fail</spf> 
      </policy_evaluated> 
    </row> 
    <identifiers> 
      <header_from>example.com</header_from>
    </identifiers> 
    <auth_results> 
      <dkim> 
        <domain>example.com</domain> 
        <result>pass</result> 
        <selector>gm5h7da67oqhnr3ccji35fdskt</selector> 
      </dkim> 
      <dkim> 
        <domain>amazonses.com</domain> 
        <result>pass</result> 
        <selector>224i4yxa5dv7c2xz3womw6peua</selector> 
      </dkim> 
      <spf> 
        <domain>amazonses.com</domain> 
        <result>pass</result> 
      </spf> 
    </auth_results> 
  </record> 
</feedback>

How to address DMARC deployment for domains confirmed to be unused for email (dangling or otherwise)

Deploying DMARC for unused or dangling domains is a proactive step to prevent abuse or unauthorized use of your domain. Once you have confirmed that all subdomains being used for sending email have the desired DMARC policies, you can publish a ‘p=reject’ tag on the organizational domain, which will prevent unauthorized usage of unused subdomains without the need to publish DMARC policies for every conceivable subdomain. For more advanced subdomain policy scenarios, read the “tree walk” definitions in https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-dmarc-dmarcbis/

Conclusion:

In conclusion, DMARC is not only a technology but also a commitment to email security, integrity, and trust. By embracing DMARC best practices, organizations can protect their users, maintain a positive brand reputation, and ensure seamless email deliverability. Every message from SES passes SPF and DKIM for “amazonses.com”, but the authenticated identifiers are not always in alignment with the domain in the “From” header which carries the DMARC policy. If email authentication is not fully configured, your messages are susceptible to delivery issues like spam filtering, or being rejected or blocked by the recipient ESP. As a best practice, you can configure both DKIM and SPF to attain optimum deliverability while sending email with SES.

About the Authors

	Bruno Giorgini is a Senior Solutions Architect specializing in Pinpoint and SES. With over two decades of experience in the IT industry, Bruno has been dedicated to assisting customers of all sizes in achieving their objectives. When he is not crafting innovative solutions for clients, Bruno enjoys spending quality time with his wife and son, exploring the scenic hiking trails around the SF Bay Area.
	Jesse Thompson is an Email Deliverability Manager with the Amazon Simple Email Service team. His background is in enterprise IT development and operations, with a focus on email abuse mitigation and encouragement of authenticity practices with open standard protocols. Jesse’s favorite activity outside of technology is recreational curling.
	Sesan Komaiya is a Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services. He works with a variety of customers, helping them with cloud adoption, cost optimization and emerging technologies. Sesan has over 15 year’s experience in Enterprise IT and has been at AWS for 5 years. In his free time, Sesan enjoys watching various sporting activities like Soccer, Tennis and Moto sport. He has 2 kids that also keeps him busy at home.
	Mudassar Bashir is a Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services. He has over ten years of experience in enterprise software engineering. His interests include web applications, containerization, and serverless technologies. He works with different customers, helping them with cloud adoption strategies.
	Priya Singh is a Cloud Support Engineer at AWS and subject matter expert in Amazon Simple Email Service. She has a 6 years of diverse experience in supporting enterprise customers across different industries. Along with Amazon SES, she is a Cloudfront enthusiast. She loves helping customers in solving issues related to Cloudfront and SES in their environment.

Handling Bounces and Complaints

2023-09-21 Tyler Holmes

Post Syndicated from Tyler Holmes original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/handling-bounces-and-complaints/

As you may have seen in Jeff Barr’s blog post or in an announcement, Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) now provides bounce and complaint notifications via Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS). You can refer to the Amazon SES Developer Guide or Jeff’s post to learn how to set up this feature. In this post, we will show you how you might manage your email list using the information you get in the Amazon SNS notifications.

Background

Amazon SES assigns a unique message ID to each email that you successfully submit to send. When Amazon SES receives a bounce or complaint message from an ISP, we forward the feedback message to you. The format of bounce and complaint messages varies between ISPs, but Amazon SES interprets these messages and, if you choose to set up Amazon SNS topics for them, categorizes them into JSON objects.

Scenario

Let’s assume you use Amazon SES to send monthly product announcements to a list of email addresses. You store the list in a database and send one email per recipient through Amazon SES. You review bounces and complaints once each day, manually interpret the bounce messages in the incoming email, and update the list. You would like to automate this process using Amazon SNS notifications with a scheduled task.

Solution

To implement this solution, we will use separate Amazon SNS topics for bounces and complaints to isolate the notification channels from each other and manage them separately. Also, since the bounce and complaint handler will not run 24/7, we need these notifications to persist until the application processes them. Amazon SNS integrates with Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), which is a durable messaging technology that allows us to persist these notifications. We will configure each Amazon SNS topic to publish to separate SQS queues. When our application runs, it will process queued notifications and update the email list. We have provided sample C# code below.

Configuration

Set up the following AWS components to handle bounce notifications:

Create an Amazon SQS queue named ses-bounces-queue.
Create an Amazon SNS topic named ses-bounces-topic.
Configure the Amazon SNS topic to publish to the SQS queue.
Configure Amazon SES to publish bounce notifications using ses-bounces-topic to ses-bounces-queue.

Set up the following AWS components to handle complaint notifications:

Create an Amazon SQS queue named ses-complaints-queue.
Create an Amazon SNS topic named ses-complaints-topic.
Configure the Amazon SNS topic to publish to the SQS queue.
Configure Amazon SES to publish complaint notifications using ses-complaints-topic to ses-complaints-queue.

Ensure that IAM policies are in place so that Amazon SNS has access to publish to the appropriate SQS queues.

Bounce Processing

Amazon SES will categorize your hard bounces into two types: permanent and transient. A permanent bounce indicates that you should never send to that recipient again. A transient bounce indicates that the recipient’s ISP is not accepting messages for that particular recipient at that time and you can retry delivery in the future. The amount of time you should wait before resending to the address that generated the transient bounce depends on the transient bounce type. Certain transient bounces require manual intervention before the message can be delivered (e.g., message too large or content error). If the bounce type is undetermined, you should manually review the bounce and act accordingly.

You will need to define some classes to simplify bounce notification parsing from JSON into .NET objects. We will use the open-source JSON.NET library.

/// <summary>Represents the bounce or complaint notification stored in Amazon SQS.</summary>
class AmazonSqsNotification
{
    public string Type { get; set; }
    public string Message { get; set; }
}

/// <summary>Represents an Amazon SES bounce notification.</summary>
class AmazonSesBounceNotification
{
    public string NotificationType { get; set; }
    public AmazonSesBounce Bounce { get; set; }
}
/// <summary>Represents meta data for the bounce notification from Amazon SES.</summary>
class AmazonSesBounce
{
    public string BounceType { get; set; }
    public string BounceSubType { get; set; }
    public DateTime Timestamp { get; set; }
    public List<AmazonSesBouncedRecipient> BouncedRecipients { get; set; }
}
/// <summary>Represents the email address of recipients that bounced
/// when sending from Amazon SES.</summary>
class AmazonSesBouncedRecipient
{
    public string EmailAddress { get; set; }
}

Sample code to handle bounces:

/// <summary>Process bounces received from Amazon SES via Amazon SQS.</summary>
/// <param name="response">The response from the Amazon SQS bounces queue 
/// to a ReceiveMessage request. This object contains the Amazon SES  
/// bounce notification.</param> 
private static void ProcessQueuedBounce(ReceiveMessageResponse response)
{
    int messages = response.ReceiveMessageResult.Message.Count;
 
    if (messages > 0)
    {
        foreach (var m in response.ReceiveMessageResult.Message)
        {
            // First, convert the Amazon SNS message into a JSON object.
            var notification = Newtonsoft.Json.JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<AmazonSqsNotification>(m.Body);
 
            // Now access the Amazon SES bounce notification.
            var bounce = Newtonsoft.Json.JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<AmazonSesBounceNotification>(notification.Message);
 
            switch (bounce.Bounce.BounceType)
            {
                case "Transient":
                    // Per our sample organizational policy, we will remove all recipients 
                    // that generate an AttachmentRejected bounce from our mailing list.
                    // Other bounces will be reviewed manually.
                    switch (bounce.Bounce.BounceSubType)
                    {
                        case "AttachmentRejected":
                            foreach (var recipient in bounce.Bounce.BouncedRecipients)
                            {
                                RemoveFromMailingList(recipient.EmailAddress);
                            }
                            break;
                        default:
                            ManuallyReviewBounce(bounce);
                            break;
                    }
                    break;
                default:
                    // Remove all recipients that generated a permanent bounce 
                    // or an unknown bounce.
                    foreach (var recipient in bounce.Bounce.BouncedRecipients)
                    {
                        RemoveFromMailingList(recipient.EmailAddress);
                    }
                    break;
            }
        }
    }
}

Complaint Processing

A complaint indicates the recipient does not want the email that you sent them. When we receive a complaint, we want to remove the recipient addresses from our list. Again, define some objects to simplify parsing complaint notifications from JSON to .NET objects.

/// <summary>Represents an Amazon SES complaint notification.</summary>
class AmazonSesComplaintNotification
{
    public string NotificationType { get; set; }
    public AmazonSesComplaint Complaint { get; set; }
}
/// <summary>Represents the email address of individual recipients that complained 
/// to Amazon SES.</summary>
class AmazonSesComplainedRecipient
{
    public string EmailAddress { get; set; }
}
/// <summary>Represents meta data for the complaint notification from Amazon SES.</summary>
class AmazonSesComplaint
{
    public List<AmazonSesComplainedRecipient> ComplainedRecipients { get; set; }
    public DateTime Timestamp { get; set; }
    public string MessageId { get; set; }
}

Sample code to handle complaints is:

/// <summary>Process complaints received from Amazon SES via Amazon SQS.</summary>
/// <param name="response">The response from the Amazon SQS complaint queue 
/// to a ReceiveMessage request. This object contains the Amazon SES 
/// complaint notification.</param>
private static void ProcessQueuedComplaint(ReceiveMessageResponse response)
{
    int messages = response.ReceiveMessageResult.Message.Count;
 
    if (messages > 0)
    {
        foreach (var
  message in response.ReceiveMessageResult.Message)
        {
            // First, convert the Amazon SNS message into a JSON object.
            var notification = Newtonsoft.Json.JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<AmazonSqsNotification>(message.Body);
 
            // Now access the Amazon SES complaint notification.
            var complaint = Newtonsoft.Json.JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<AmazonSesComplaintNotification>(notification.Message);
 
            foreach (var recipient in complaint.Complaint.ComplainedRecipients)
            {
                // Remove the email address that complained from our mailing list.
                RemoveFromMailingList(recipient.EmailAddress);
            }
        }
    }
}

Final Thoughts

We hope that you now have the basic information on how to use bounce and complaint notifications. For more information, please review our API reference and Developer Guide; it describes all actions, error codes and restrictions that apply to Amazon SES.

If you have comments or feedback about this feature, please post them on the Amazon SES forums. We actively monitor the forum and frequently engage with customers. Happy sending with Amazon SES!

How quirion created nested email templates using Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)

2023-07-18 Dominik Richter

Post Syndicated from Dominik Richter original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/how-quirion-created-nested-email-templates-using-amazon-simple-email-service-ses/

This is part two of the two-part guest series on extending Simple Email Services with advanced functionality. Find part one here.

quirion, founded in 2013, is an award-winning German robo-advisor with more than 1 billion Euro under management. At quirion, we send out five thousand emails a day to more than 60,000 customers.

Managing many email templates can be challenging

We chose Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) because it is an easy-to-use and cost-effective email platform. In particular, we benefit from email templates in SES, which ensure a consistent look and feel of our communication. These templates come with a styled and personalized HTML email body, perfect for transactional emails. However, managing many email templates can be challenging. Several templates share common elements, such as the company’s logo, name or imprint. Over time, some of these elements may change. If they are not updated across all templates, the result is an inconsistent set of templates. To overcome this problem, we created an application to extend the SES template functionality with an interface for creating and managing nested templates.

This post shows how you can implement this solution using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda and Amazon DynamoDB.

Solution: compose email from nested templates using AWS Lambda

The solution we built is fully serverless, which means we do not have to manage the underlying infrastructure. We use AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) to deploy the architecture.

The figure below describes the architecture diagram for the proposed solution.

The entry point to the application is an API Gateway that routes requests to a Lambda function. A request consists of an HTML file that represents a part of an email template and metadata that describes the structure of the template.
The Lambda function is the key component of the application. It takes the HTML file and the metadata and stores them in a S3 Bucket and a DynamoDB table.
Depending on the metadata, it takes an existing template from storage, inserts the HTML from the request into it and creates a SES email template.

Architecture diagram of the solution: new templates in Amazon SES are created by a Lambda function accessed through API Gateway. THe Lambda function reads and writes HTML from S3 and reads and writes metadata from DynamoDB.

The solution is simplified for this blog post and is used to show the possibilities of SES. We will not discuss the code of the Lambda function as there are several ways to implement it depending on your preferred programming language.

Prerequisites

An AWS Account that provides access to AWS services.
An Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) verified identity. You can create and verify a sending identity by following the steps described in the documentation.
AWS CDK installed.
AWS CLI installed.
git installed.
Depending on your system, Docker may need to be running.
GO installed.
curl installed.

Walkthrough

Step 1: Use the AWS CDK to deploy the application
To download and deploy the application run the following commands:

$ git clone https://github.com/quirionit/aws-ses-examples.git
$ cd aws-ses-examples/projects/go-src
$ go mod tidy
$ cd ../../projects/template-api
$ npm install
$ cdk deploy

Step 2: Create nested email templates

To create a nested email template, complete the following steps:

On the AWS Console, choose the API Gateway.
You should see an API with a name that includes SesTemplateApi.
Click on the name and note the Invoke URL from the details page.
In your terminal, navigate to aws-ses-examples/projects/template-api/files and run the following command. Note that you must use your gateway’s Invoke URL.
```
curl -F [email protected] -F "isWrapper=true" -F "templateName=m-full" -F "child=content" -F "variables=FIRSTNAME" -F "variables=LASTNAME" -F "plain=Hello {{.FIRSTNAME}} {{.LASTNAME}},{{template \"content\" .}}" YOUR INVOKE URL/emails
```
The request triggers the Lambda function, which creates a template in DynamoDB and S3. In addition, the Lambda function uses the properties of the request to decide when and how to create a template in SES. With “isWrapper=true” the template is marked as a template that wraps another template and therefore no template is created in SES. “child=content” specifies the entry point for the child template that is used within m-full.html. It also uses FIRSTNAME and LASTNAME as replacement tags for personalization.
In your terminal, run the following command to create a SES email template that uses the template created in step 4 as a wrapper.

Step 3: Analyze the result

On the AWS Console, choose DynamoDB.
From the sidebar, choose Tables.
Select the table with the name that includes SesTemplateTable.
Choose Explore table items. It should now return two new items.

The table stores the metadata that describes how to create a SES email template. Creating an email template in SES is initiated when an element’s Child attribute is empty or null. This is the case for the item with the name order-confirmation. It uses the BucketKey attribute to identify the required HTML stored in S3 and the Parent attribute to determine the metadata from the parent template. The Variables attribute is used to describe the placeholders that are used in the template.
On the AWS Console, choose S3.
Select the bucket with the name that starts with ses-email-templates.
Select the template/ folder. It should return two objects.

The m-full.html contains the structure and the design of an email template and is used with the order-confirmation.html which contains the content.
On the AWS Console, choose the Amazon Simple Email Service.
From the sidebar, choose Email templates. It should return the following template.

Step 4: Send an email with the created template

Open the send-order-confirmation.json file from aws-ses-examples/projects/template-api/files in a text editor.
Set a verified email address as Source and ToAddresses and save the file.
Navigate your terminal to aws-ses-examples/projects/template-api/files and run the following command:
aws ses send-templated-email --cli-input-json file://send-order-confirmation.json
As a result, you should get an email.

Step 5: Cleaning up

Navigate your terminal to aws-ses-examples/projects/template-api.
Delete all resources with cdk destroy.
Delete the created SES email template with:
aws ses delete-template --template-name order-confirmation

Next Steps

There are several ways to extend this solution’s functionality, including the ones below:

If you send an email that contains invalid personalization content, Amazon SES might accept the message, but won’t be able to deliver it. For this reason, if you plan to send personalized email, you should configure Amazon SES to send Rendering Failure event notifications.
The Amazon SES template feature does not support sending attachments, but you can add the functionality yourself. See part one of this blog series for instructions.
When you create a new Amazon SES account, by default your emails are sent from IP addresses that are shared with other SES users. You can also use dedicated IP addresses that are reserved for your exclusive use. This gives you complete control over your sender reputation and enables you to isolate your reputation for different segments within email programs.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we explored how to use Amazon SES with email templates to easily create complex transactional emails. The AWS CLI was used to trigger SES to send an email, but that could easily be replaced by other AWS services like Step Functions. This solution as a whole is a fully serverless architecture where we don’t have to manage the underlying infrastructure. We used the AWS CDK to deploy a predefined architecture and analyzed the deployed resources.

About the authors

	Mark Kirchner is a backend engineer at quirion AG. He uses AWS CDK and several AWS services to provide a cloud backend for a web application used for financial services. He follows a full serverless approach and enjoys resolving problems with AWS.
	Dominik Richter is a Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services. He primarily works with financial services customers in Germany and particularly enjoys Serverless technology, which he also uses for his own mobile apps.

The content and opinions in this post are those of the third-party author and AWS is not responsible for the content or accuracy of this post.

How quirion sends attachments using email templates with Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)

2023-07-18 Dominik Richter

Post Syndicated from Dominik Richter original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/how-quirion-sends-attachments-using-email-templates-with-amazon-simple-email-service-ses/

This is part one of the two-part guest series on extending Simple Email Services with advanced functionality. Find part two here.

quirion is an award-winning German robo-advisor, founded in 2013, and with more than 1 billion euros under management. At quirion, we send out five thousand emails a day to more than 60,000 customers.

We chose Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) because it is an easy-to-use and cost-effective email platform. In particular, we benefit from email templates in SES, which ensure a consistent look and feel of our communication. These templates come with a styled and personalized HTML email body, perfect for transactional emails. Sometimes it is necessary to add attachments to an email, which is currently not supported by the SES template feature. To overcome this problem, we created a solution to use the SES template functionality and add file attachments.

This post shows how you can implement this solution using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon EventBridge, AWS Lambda and AWS Step Functions.

Solution: orchestrate different email sending options using AWS Step Functions

The solution we built is fully serverless, which means we do not have to manage the underlying infrastructure. We use AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) to deploy the architecture and analyze the resources.

The solution extends SES to send attachments using email templates. SES offers three possibilities for sending emails:

Simple — A standard email message. When you create this type of message, you specify the sender, the recipient, and the message body, and Amazon SES assembles the message for you.
Raw — A raw, MIME-formatted email message. When you send this type of email, you have to specify all of the message headers, as well as the message body. You can use this message type to send messages that contain attachments. The message that you specify has to be a valid MIME message.
Templated — A message that contains personalization tags. When you send this type of email, Amazon SES API v2 automatically replaces the tags with values that you specify.

In this post, we will combine the Raw and the Templated options.

The figure below describes the architecture diagram for the proposed solution.

The entry point to the application is an EventBridge event bus that routes incoming events to a Step Function workflow.
An event consists of the personalization parameters, the sender and recipient addresses, the template name and optionally the document-related properties such as a reference to the S3 bucket in which the document is stored. Depending on whether the event contains document-related properties, the Step Function workflow decides how the email is prepared and sent.
In case the event does not contain document-related properties, it uses the SendEmail action to send a templated email. The action requires the template name and the data to replace the personalization tags.
If the event contains document-related properties, the raw sending option of the SendEmail action must be used. If we also want to use an email template, we need to use that as a raw MIME message. So, we use the TestRenderEmailTemplate action to get the raw MIME message from the template and use a Lambda function to get and add the document. The Lambda function then triggers SES to send the email.

The solution is simplified for this blog post and is used to show the possibilities of SES. We will not discuss the code of the lambda function as there are several ways to implement it depending on your preferred programming language.

Architecture diagram of the solution: an AWS Step Functions workflow is triggered by EventBridge. If the event contains no document, the workflow triggers Amazon SES SendEmail. Otherwise, it uses SES TestRenderEmailTemplate as input for a Lambda function, which gets the document from S3 and then sends the email.

Prerequisites

An AWS Account that provides access to AWS services.
An Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) verified identity. You can create and verify a sending identity by following the steps described in the documentation.
AWS CDK installed.
AWS CLI installed.
Depending on your system, Docker may need to be running.
git installed.
GO installed.

Walkthrough

Step 1: Use the AWS CDK to deploy the application

To download and deploy the application run the following commands:

$ git clone [email protected]:quirionit/aws-ses-examples.git
$ cd aws-ses-examples/projects/go-src
$ go mod tidy
$ cd ../../projects/email-sender
$ npm install
$ cdk deploy

Step 2: Create a SES email template

In your terminal, navigate to aws-ses-examples/projects/email-sender and run:

aws ses create-template --cli-input-json file://files/hello_doc.json

Step 3: Upload a sample document to S3

To upload a document to S3, complete the following steps:

On the AWS Console, choose the S3.
Select the bucket with the name that starts with ses-documents.
Copy and save the bucket name for later.
Create a new folder called test.
Upload the hello.txt from aws-ses-examples/projects/email-sender/files into the folder.

Screenshot of Amazon S3 console, showing the ses-documents bucket containing the file tes/hello.txt

Step 4: Trigger sending an email using Amazon EventBridge

To trigger sending an email, complete the following steps:

On the AWS Console, choose the Amazon EventBridge.
Select Event busses from the sidebar.
Select Send events.
Create an event as the following image shows. You can copy the Event detail from aws-ses-examples/projects/email-sender/files/event.json. Don’t forget to replace the sender, recipient and bucket with your values.
As a result of sending the event, you should receive an email with the document attached.
To send an email without attachment, edit the event as follows:

Step 5: Analyze the result

On the AWS Console, choose Step Functions.
Select the state machine with the name that includes EmailSender.
You should see two Succeeded executions. If you select them the dataflows should look like this:
You can select each step of the dataflows and analyze the inputs and outputs.

Step 6: Cleaning up

Navigate your terminal to aws-ses-examples/projects/email-sender.
Delete all resources with cdk destroy.
Delete the created SES email template with:

aws ses delete-template --template-name HelloDocument

Next Steps

There are several ways to extend this solution’s functionality, see some of them below:

If you send an email that contains invalid personalization content, Amazon SES might accept the message, but won’t be able to deliver it. For this reason, if you plan to send personalized email, you should configure Amazon SES to send Rendering Failure event notifications.
You can create nested templates to share common elements, such as the company’s logo, name or imprint. See part two of this blog series for instructions.
When you create a new Amazon SES account, by default your emails are sent from IP addresses that are shared with other SES users. You can also use dedicated IP addresses that are reserved for your exclusive use. This gives you complete control over your sender reputation and enables you to isolate your reputation for different segments within email programs.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we explored how to use Amazon SES to send attachments using email templates. We used an Amazon EventBridge to trigger a Step Function that chooses between sending a raw or templated SES email. This solution uses a full serverless architecture without having to manage the underlying infrastructure. We used the AWS CDK to deploy a predefined architecture and analyzed the deployed resources.

About the authors

	Mark Kirchner is a backend engineer at quirion AG. He uses AWS CDK and several AWS services to provide a cloud backend for a web application used for financial services. He follows a full serverless approach and enjoys resolving problems with AWS.
	Dominik Richter is a Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services. He primarily works with financial services customers in Germany and particularly enjoys Serverless technology, which he also uses for his own mobile apps.

The content and opinions in this post are those of the third-party author and AWS is not responsible for the content or accuracy of this post.

Building Generative AI into Marketing Strategies: A Primer

2023-07-06 nnatri

Post Syndicated from nnatri original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/building-generative-ai-into-marketing-strategies-a-primer/

Introduction

Artificial Intelligence has undoubtedly shaped many industries and is poised to be one of the most transformative technologies in the 21st century. Among these is the field of marketing where the application of generative AI promises to transform the landscape. This blog post explores how generative AI can revolutionize marketing strategies, offering innovative solutions and opportunities.

According to Harvard Business Review, marketing’s core activities, such as understanding customer needs, matching them to products and services, and persuading people to buy, can be dramatically enhanced by AI. A 2018 McKinsey analysis of more than 400 advanced use cases showed that marketing was the domain where AI would contribute the greatest value. The ability to leverage AI can not only help automate and streamline processes but also deliver personalized, engaging content to customers. It enhances the ability of marketers to target the right audience, predict consumer behavior, and provide personalized customer experiences. AI allows marketers to process and interpret massive amounts of data, converting it into actionable insights and strategies, thereby redefining the way businesses interact with customers.

Generating content is just one part of the equation. AI-generated content, no matter how good, is useless if it does not arrive at the intended audience at the right point of time. Integrating the generated content into an automated marketing pipeline that not only understands the customer profile but also delivers a personalized experience at the right point of interaction is also crucial to getting the intended action from the customer.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a robust platform for implementing generative AI in marketing strategies. AWS offers a range of AI and machine learning services that can be leveraged for various marketing use cases, from content creation to customer segmentation and personalized recommendations. Two services that are instrumental to delivering customer contents and can be easily integrated with other generative AI services are Amazon Pinpoint and Amazon Simple Email Service. By integrating generative AI with Amazon Pinpoint and Amazon SES, marketers can automate the creation of personalized messages for their customers, enhancing the effectiveness of their campaigns. This combination allows for a seamless blend of AI-powered content generation and targeted, data-driven customer engagement.

As we delve deeper into this blog post, we’ll explore the mechanics of generative AI, its benefits and how AWS services can facilitate its integration into marketing communications.

What is Generative AI?

Generative AI is a subset of artificial intelligence that leverages machine learning techniques to generate new data instances that resemble your training data. It works by learning the underlying patterns and structures of the input data, and then uses this understanding to generate new, similar data. This is achieved through the use of models like Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), and Transformer models.

What do Generative AI buzzwords mean?

In the world of AI, buzzwords are abundant. Terms like “deep learning”, “neural networks”, “machine learning”, “generative AI”, and “large language models” are often used interchangeably, but they each have distinct meanings. Understanding these terms is crucial for appreciating the capabilities and limitations of different AI technologies.

Machine Learning (ML) is a subset of AI that involves the development of algorithms that allow computers to learn from and make decisions or predictions based on data. These algorithms can be ‘trained’ on a dataset and then used to predict or classify new data. Machine learning models can be broadly categorized into supervised learning, unsupervised learning, semi-supervised learning, and reinforcement learning.

Deep Learning is a subset of machine learning that uses neural networks with many layers (hence “deep”) to model and understand complex patterns. These layers of neurons process different features, and their outputs are combined to produce a final result. Deep learning models can handle large amounts of data and are particularly good at processing images, speech, and text.

Generative AI refers specifically to AI models that can generate new data that mimic the data they were trained on. This is achieved through the use of models like Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs). Generative AI can create anything from written content to visual designs, and even music, making it a versatile tool in the hands of marketers.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are a type of generative AI that are trained on a large corpus of text data and can generate human-like text. They predict the probability of a word given the previous words used in the text. They are particularly useful in applications like text completion, translation, summarization, and more. While they are a type of generative AI, they are specifically designed for handling text data.

Simply put, you can understand that Large Language Model is a subset of Generative AI, which is then a subset of Machine Learning and they ultimately falls under the umbrella term of Artificial Intelligence.

What are the problems with generative AI and marketing?

While generative AI holds immense potential for transforming marketing strategies, it’s important to be aware of its limitations and potential pitfalls, especially when it comes to content generation and customer engagement. Here are some common challenges that marketers should be aware of:

Bias in Generative AI Generative AI models learn from the data they are trained on. If the training data is biased, the AI model will likely reproduce these biases in its output. For example, if a model is trained primarily on data from one demographic, it may not accurately represent other demographics, leading to marketing campaigns that are ineffective or offensive. Imagine if you are trying to generate an image for a campaign targeting females, a generative AI model might not generate images of females in jobs like doctors, lawyers or judges, leading your campaign to suffer from bias and uninclusiveness.

Insensitivity to Cultural Nuances Generative AI models may not fully understand cultural nuances or sensitive topics, which can lead to content that is insensitive or even harmful. For instance, a generative AI model used to create social media posts for a global brand may inadvertently generate content that is seen as disrespectful or offensive by certain cultures or communities.

Potential for Inappropriate or Offensive Content Generative AI models can sometimes generate content that is inappropriate or offensive. This is often because the models do not fully understand the context in which certain words or phrases should be used. It’s important to have safeguards in place to review and approve content before it’s published. A common problem with LLMs is hallucination: whereby the model speaks false knowledge as if it is accurate. A marketing team might mistakenly publish a auto-generated promotional content that contains a 20% discount on an item when no such promotions were approved. This could have disastrous effect if safeguards are not in place and erodes customers’ trust.

Intellectual Property and Legal Concerns Generative AI models can create new content, such as images, music, videos, and text, which raises questions of ownership and potential copyright infringement. Being a relatively new field, legal discussions are still ongoing to discuss legal implications of using Generative AI, e.g. who should own generated AI content, and copyright infringement.

Not a Replacement for Human Creativity Finally, while generative AI can automate certain aspects of marketing campaigns, it cannot replace the creativity or emotional connections that marketers use in crafting compelling campaigns. The most successful marketing campaigns touch the hearts of the customers, and while Generative AI is very capable of replicating human content, it still lacks in mimicking that “human touch”.

In conclusion, while generative AI offers exciting possibilities for marketing, it’s important to approach its use with a clear understanding of its limitations and potential pitfalls. By doing so, marketers can leverage the benefits of generative AI while mitigating risks.

How can I use generative AI in marketing communications?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a comprehensive suite of services that facilitate the use of generative AI in marketing. These services are designed to handle a variety of tasks, from data processing and storage to machine learning and analytics, making it easier for marketers to implement and benefit from generative AI technologies.

Overview of Relevant AWS Services

AWS offers several services that are particularly relevant for generative AI in marketing:

Amazon Bedrock: This service makes FMs accessible via an API. Bedrock offers the ability to access a range of powerful FMs for text and images, including Amazon’s Titan FMs. With Bedrock’s serverless experience, customers can easily find the right model for what they’re trying to get done, get started quickly, privately customize FMs with their own data, and easily integrate and deploy them into their applications using the AWS tools and capabilities they are familiar with.
Amazon Titan Models: These are two new large language models (LLMs) that AWS is announcing. The first is a generative LLM for tasks such as summarization, text generation, classification, open-ended Q&A, and information extraction. The second is an embeddings LLM that translates text inputs into numerical representations (known as embeddings) that contain the semantic meaning of the text. In response to the pitfalls mentioned above around Generative AI hallucinations and inaccurate information, AWS is actively working on improving accuracy and ensuring its Titan models produce high-quality responses, said Bratin Saha, an AWS vice president.
Amazon SageMaker: This fully managed service enables data scientists and developers to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly. SageMaker includes modules that can be used for generative AI, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs).
Amazon Pinpoint: This flexible and scalable outbound and inbound marketing communications service enables businesses to engage with customers across multiple messaging channels. Amazon Pinpoint is designed to scale with your business, allowing you to send messages to a large number of users in a short amount of time. It integrates with AWS’s generative AI services to enable personalized, AI-driven marketing campaigns.
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES): This cost-effective, flexible, and scalable email service enables marketers to send transactional emails, marketing messages, and other types of high-quality content to their customers. SES integrates with other AWS services, making it easy to send emails from applications being hosted on services such as Amazon EC2. SES also works seamlessly with Amazon Pinpoint, allowing for the creation of customer engagement communications that drive user activity and engagement.

How to build Generative AI into marketing communications

Dynamic Audience Targeting and Segmentation: Generative AI can help marketers to dynamically target and segment their audience. It can analyze customer data and behavior to identify patterns and trends, which can then be used to create more targeted marketing campaigns. Using Amazon Sagemaker or the soon-to-be-available Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Titan Models, Generative AI can suggest labels for customers based on unstructured data. According to McKinsey, generative AI can analyze data and identify consumer behavior patterns to help marketers create appealing content that resonates with their audience.

Personalized Marketing: Generative AI can be used to automate the creation of marketing content. This includes generating text for blogs, social media posts, and emails, as well as creating images and videos. This can save marketers a significant amount of time and effort, allowing them to focus on other aspects of their marketing strategy. Where it really shines is the ability to productionize marketing content creation, reducing the needs for marketers to create multiple copies for different customer segments. Previously, marketers would need to generate many different copies for each granularity of customers (e.g. attriting customers who are between the age of 25-34 and loves food). Generative AI can automate this process, providing the opportunities to dynamically create these contents programmatically and automatically send out to the most relevant segments via Amazon Pinpoint or Amazon SES.

Marketing Automation: Generative AI can automate various aspects of marketing, such as email marketing, social media marketing, and search engine marketing. This includes automating the creation and distribution of marketing content, as well as analyzing the performance of marketing campaigns. Amazon Pinpoint currently automates customer communications using journeys which is a customized, multi-step engagement experience. Generative AI could create a Pinpoint journey based on customer engagement data, engagement parameters and a prompt. This enables GenAI to not only personalize the content but create a personalized omnichannel experience that can extend throughout a period of time. It then becomes possible that journeys are created dynamically by generative AI and A/B tested on the fly to achieve an optimal pre-defined Key Performance Indicator (KPI).

A Sample Generative AI Use Case in Marketing Communications

AWS services are designed to work together, making it easy to implement generative AI in your marketing strategies. For instance, you can use Amazon SageMaker to build and train your generative AI models which assist with automating marketing content creation, and Amazon Pinpoint or Amazon SES to deliver the content to your customers.

Companies using AWS can theoretically supplement their existing workloads with generative AI capabilities without the needs for migration. The following reference architecture outlines a sample use case and showcases how Generative AI can be integrated into your customer journeys built on the AWS cloud. An e-commerce company can potentially receive many complaints emails a day. Companies spend a lot of money to acquire customers, it’s therefore important to think about how to turn that negative experience into a positive one.

GenAIMarketingSolutionArchitecture

When an email is received via Amazon SES (1), its content can be passed through to generative AI models using GANs to help with sentiment analysis (2). An article published by Amazon Science utilizes GANs for sentiment analysis for cases where a lack of data is a problem. Alternatively, one can also use Amazon Comprehend at this step and run A/B tests between the two models. The limitations with Amazon Comprehend would be the limited customizations you can perform to the model to fit your business needs.

Once the email’s sentiment is determined, the sentiment event is logged into Pinpoint (3), which then triggers an automatic winback journey (4).

Generative AI (e.g. HuggingFace’s Bloom Text Generation Models) can again be used here to dynamically create the content without needing to wait for the marketer’s input (5). Whereas marketers would need to generate many different copies for each granularity of customers (e.g. attriting customers who are between the age of 25-34 and loves food), generative AI provides the opportunities to dynamically create these contents on the fly given the above inputs.

Once the campaign content has been generated, the model pumps the template backs into Amazon Pinpoint (6), which then sends the personalized copy to the customer (7).

Result: Another customer is saved from attrition!

Conclusion

The landscape of generative AI is vast and ever-evolving, offering a plethora of opportunities for marketers to enhance their strategies and deliver more personalized, engaging content. AWS plays a pivotal role in this landscape, providing a comprehensive suite of services that facilitate the implementation of generative AI in marketing. From building and training AI models with Amazon SageMaker to delivering personalized messages with Amazon Pinpoint and Amazon SES, AWS provides the tools and infrastructure needed to harness the power of generative AI.

The potential of generative AI in relation to the marketer is immense. It offers the ability to automate content creation, personalize customer interactions, and derive valuable insights from data, among other benefits. However, it’s important to remember that while generative AI can automate certain aspects of marketing, it is not a replacement for human creativity and intuition. Instead, it should be viewed as a tool that can augment human capabilities and free up time for marketers to focus on strategy and creative direction.

Get started with Generative AI in marketing communications

As we conclude this exploration of generative AI and its applications in marketing, we encourage you to:

Brainstorm potential Generative AI use cases for your business. Consider how you can leverage generative AI to enhance your marketing strategies. This could involve automating content creation, personalizing customer interactions, or deriving insights from data.
Start leveraging generative AI in your marketing strategies with AWS today. AWS provides a comprehensive suite of services that make it easy to implement generative AI in your marketing strategies. By integrating these services into your workflows, you can enhance personalization, improve customer engagement, and drive better results from your campaigns.
Watch out for the next part in the series of integrating Generative AI into Amazon Pinpoint and SES. We will delve deeper into how you can leverage Amazon Pinpoint and SES together with generative AI to enhance your marketing campaigns. Stay tuned!

The journey into the world of generative AI is just beginning. As technology continues to evolve, so too will the opportunities for marketers to leverage AI to enhance their strategies and deliver more personalized, engaging content. We look forward to exploring this exciting frontier with you.

About the Author

Tristan (Tri) Nguyen

How to list over 1000 email addresses from account-level suppression list

2023-06-29 vmgaddam

Post Syndicated from vmgaddam original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/how-to-list-over-1000-email-addresses-from-account-level-suppression-list/

Overview of solution

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) offers an account-level suppression list, which assists customers in avoiding sending emails to addresses that have previously resulted in bounce or complaint events. This feature is designed to protect the sender’s reputation and enhance message delivery rates. There are various types of suppression lists available, including the global suppression List, account-level suppression list, and configuration set-level suppression. The account-level suppression list is owned and managed by the customer, providing them with control over their list and account reputation. Additionally, customers can utilize the configuration set-level suppression feature for more precise control over suppression list management, which overrides the account-level suppression list.

Maintaining a healthy sender reputation with email providers (such as Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail) increases the probability of emails reaching recipients’ inboxes instead of being marked as spam. One effective approach to uphold sender reputation involves refraining from sending emails to invalid email addresses and disinterested recipients.

The account-level suppression list can be managed using Amazon SES console or AWS CLI which provides an easy way to manage addresses including bulk actions to add or remove addresses.

Currently, If the account-level suppression list contains more than 1000 records, we need to use NextToken to obtain a complete list of email addresses in a paginated manner. If the email address you are looking for is not within the first 1000 records of the response, you won’t be able to obtain the information from the account-level suppression list with one single command. To list all the email addresses within the account-level suppression, we use Amazon SES ListSuppressedDestinations API. This API allows you to fetch the NextToken and pass it to a follow-up request in order to retrieve another page of results.

The code below creates a loop that makes multiple requests, in each iteration, the next token is replaced, aiding in retrieving all email addresses that have been added to the account-level suppression list.

Prerequisite

The code below can be used to run in your local machine or using AWS CloudShell As part of this blog spot, we will be using AWS CloudShell to fetch the list.

Note: Python 3 and Python 2 are both ready to use in the shell environment. Python 3 is now considered the default version of the programming language (support for Python 2 ended in January 2020).

1) An active AWS account.
2) User logged in to AWS management console must have “ses:ListSuppressedDestinations” permissions.

Walkthrough

Sign in to AWS management console and select the region where you are using Amazon SES
Launch AWS CloudShell
Save the code specified below as a file in your local environment. Example: List_Account_Level.py
Click Actions and Upload File (List_Account_Level.py)

Upload File to AWS CloudShell

5. Run Python code.

Python3 List_Account_Level.py >> Email_Addresses_List.json

6. The file Email_Addresses_List.json will be saved in current directory
7. To download the file – Click Actions and Download File providing File name Email_Addresses_List.json

Download File from AWS CloudShell

List the Email addresses in your Amazon SES account suppression list added to recent bounce or complaint event using Python.

We used the ListSuppressedDestinations operation in the SES API v2 to create a list with all the email addresses that are on your account-level suppression list for your account including bounces and complaints.

Note: SES account-level suppression list applies to your AWS account in the current AWS Region.

import boto3
from datetime import datetime
import json

def showTimestamp(results):
    updated_results = []
    for eachAddress in results:
        updated_address = eachAddress.copy()
        updated_address['LastUpdateTime'] = eachAddress['LastUpdateTime'].strftime("%m/%d/%Y, %H:%M:%S")
        updated_results.append(updated_address)
    return updated_results

def get_resources_from(supression_details):
    results = supression_details['SuppressedDestinationSummaries']
    next_token = supression_details.get('NextToken', None)
    return results, next_token

def main():
    client = boto3.client('sesv2')
    next_token = ''  # Variable to hold the pagination token
    results = []   # List for the entire resource collection
    # Call the `list_suppressed_destinations` method in a loop

    while next_token is not None:
        if next_token:
            suppression_response = client.list_suppressed_destinations(
                PageSize=1000,
                NextToken=next_token
            )
        else:
            suppression_response = client.list_suppressed_destinations(
                PageSize=1000
            )
        current_batch, next_token = get_resources_from(suppression_response)
        results += current_batch

    results = showTimestamp(results)

    print(json.dumps(results, indent=2, sort_keys=False))

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Sample Response

Returns all of the email addresses and the output resembles the following example:

[{
    "EmailAddress": "[email protected]",
    "Reason": "BOUNCE",
    "LastUpdateTime": "04/30/2021, 15:43:01"
}, {
    "EmailAddress": "[email protected]",
    "Reason": "BOUNCE",
    "LastUpdateTime": "04/30/2021, 15:43:01"
}, {
    "EmailAddress": "[email protected]",
    "Reason": "BOUNCE",
    "LastUpdateTime": "04/30/2021, 15:43:01"
}, {
    "EmailAddress": "[email protected]",
    "Reason": "BOUNCE",
    "LastUpdateTime": "04/30/2021, 15:43:00"
}, {
    "EmailAddress": "[email protected]",
    "Reason": "COMPLAINT",
    "LastUpdateTime": "06/22/2023, 12:59:31"
}]

Cleaning up

The response file Email_Addresses_List.json will contain the list of all the email addresses on your account-level suppression list even if there are more than 1000 records. Please free to delete files that were created as part of the process if you no longer need them.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we explained listing of all email addresses if the account-level suppression list contains more than 1000 records using AWS CouldShell. Having complete list of email addresses will help you identify email addresses you are looking for and that are not included in the first 1000 records of the response. You can validate email address and determine who can receive email that can be removed from the account-level suppression list. This protect the sender reputations and improving delivery rates.

Follow-up

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/sending-email-suppression-list.html
https://repost.aws/knowledge-center/ses-remove-email-from-suppresion-list

About the Author

Venkata Manoj Gaddam is Cloud Support Engineer II at AWS and Service Matter Expert in Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). Along with Amazon SES and S3, he is AWS Snow Family enthusiast. In his free time, he enjoys hanging out with friends and traveling.

How to verify an email address in SES which does not have an inbox

2023-06-29 ajibho

Post Syndicated from ajibho original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/how-to-verify-an-email-address-in-ses-which-does-not-have-an-inbox/

Overview of solution

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is an email platform that provides a straightforward and cost-effective solution for sending and receiving emails using your own email addresses and domains.

One of the most common use cases for using separate verified from email address is in online retails/e-commerce platforms. Online/e-commerce platform need to send emails to their customers where the from address should look like “[email protected]. In these cases, the From addresses like [email protected] does not have inbox setup for receiving emails. Using the following solution, you can avoid setting up an inbox for the email identity while still verifying the email address for sending and receiving.

In order to send emails from SES using email/domain identity, we need to have the From email identity or domain verified in Amazon SES in a supported region. When verifying a domain,you have the option to use Easy DKIM or Bring Your Own DKIM(BYOD). For verifying an email address, you need to create an identity in Amazon SES for the respective region. Once the required email address identity is created, you will receive a verification link in your inbox. To successfully verify the email address, simply open the link in your browser. In this case, you would need to have inbox setup for email address to receive the verification link from [email protected].

Verifying a domain in Amazon SES allows you to send emails from any identity associated with that domain. For example, if you create and verify a domain identity called example.com, you don’t need to create separate subdomain identities for a.example.com, a.b.example.com, nor separate email address identities for [email protected], [email protected], and so on. Therefore, the settings for the domain remain the same for all From addresses and you cannot separate you sending activity. You can use this solution to verify the From address without setting up an inbox and differentiate sending activity and tracking based on settings. The benefits of having different email settings from the domain are mentioned below.

Benefits of verifying the email separately for the same domain:

1) When you verify the email along with your domain, you can keep the settings different for the two Identities. You can setup different Configuration sets, notifications and dedicated IP pools for the verified email. This separation enables you to manage domain and email settings independently.
2) You can have two separate emails for sending transaction ([email protected]) and Marketing emails ([email protected]). After assigning different configuration sets, you can monitor the bounces and complaints separately for the sender. A best practice here would be separating the Transactional and Marketing in sub domains. Having both types in the same domain can adversely affect the reputation for your domain, and reduce deliverability of your transactional emails.
3) Using different dedicated IP pools, you can separate the sending IPs for Marketing and transaction or any other emails. Thus, your IP reputation for one use case is not affected by any other emails.

Prerequisite

1) An active AWS account.
2) Administrative Access to the Amazon SES Console and Amazon Simple Storage Service(S3) console.
3) A verified identity (Domain) with an MX record for the domain pointing to a Receiving Endpoint in one of the following region in Amazon SES.

Region Name	Region	Receiving Endpoint
US East (N. Virginia)	us-east-1	inbound-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
US West (Oregon)	us-west-2	inbound-smtp.us-west-2.amazonaws.com
Europe (Ireland)	eu-west-1	inbound-smtp.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com

Solution walkthrough

In order to verify the email in SES, we need to verify the link send from Amazon SES in the email inbox. We will setup receiving rule set and add S3 bucket with required permissions to store emails from Amazon SES in S3 bucket. After receiving the email in S3 bucket, download the email to get the verification link. Open the verification link in a browser to complete the process.

Step 1 : How to setup SES Email Receiving Ruleset for S3 bucket

1) Open the Amazon SES console.
2) In the navigation pane, under Configuration, choose Email Receiving.
Email Receiving Rule set

3) To create a new rule set, choose Create a Rule Set, enter a rule set name, and then choose Create a Rule Set.
Note: If you create a new rule set, select the rule set, and then choose Set as Active Rule Set. Only one of your receipt rule sets can be the active rule set at any given time.

4) Choose Active Rule Set and Choose Create Rule.

Active Ruleset

5) Enter a unique rule name. If your use case requires TLS or spam and virus scanning, then choose Require TLS or Enable spam and virus scanning. To make this an active rule, select the Enabled checkbox. Choose Next.
Receiving Rule Setting

6) To receive emails for specific verified domain, click Add new recipient condition and enter the domain/email address. You can leave it blank and it will store for all the verified domain addresses with receiving setup.
Add recipient condition

7) Choose Add new action, and then choose Deliver to S3 bucket
Action Deliver to S3 bucket

8) Click on Create S3 bucket

9) Enter a unique S3 bucket name and click on ‘Create Bucket’
Note: S3 Bucket policy will be added automatically.
Provide Unique S3 bucket name

(Optional) Choose Message encryption for Amazon SES to use an Amazon Key Management Server (Amazon KMS) key to encrypt your emails.
(Optional) For SNS topic, select an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic to notify you when Amazon SES delivers an email to the S3 bucket.
Add Action in Receiving rule set

10) Click Next and Create Rule.
Review and Create Ruleset

Step 2: Verifying email address in Amazon SES using S3

The following procedure shows you how to verify Email address in Amazon SES.
1) Open the Amazon SES console.
2) In the navigation pane, under Configuration, choose Verified identities.
3) Choose Create identity.
Create Verified Identity

4) Under Identity details, choose Email address as the identity type you want to create.
5) For Email address, enter the email address that you want to use. The email address must be an address that’s able to receive mail and that you have access to.
(Optional) If you want to Assign a default configuration set, select the check box.
6) To create your email address identity, choose Create identity. After it’s created, you should receive a verification email within five minutes from [email protected].

Create Verified identity and Enter
7) Open the Amazon S3 console.
Go to S3 bucket

8) Open the S3 Bucket that you configured to store the Amazon SES emails. Verify that the bucket contains the test email that you sent. It can take a few minutes for the test email to appear.
Select the Received Email in S3 bucket

9) Select the email/object received in S3 bucket. Click Download.
Download the received email/object

10) Open the Downloaded file in Notepad and copy the verification link under the Subject. Paste the link in your Browser and confirm it.
Open the Downloaded email in Notepad

11) Once the link is confirmed, you can check in SES console and confirm under verified identities that your email address is in verified Status.
Browser link after pasting the verification link

Verified Identity confirmation in SES console

Cleaning up:

You should have successfully verified email address in Amazon SES using S3 bucket. To avoid incurring any extra charges, remember to delete any resources created manually if you no longer need them for monitoring.

Steps for removing the resources:

1) Delete all the created/verified Identities.
2) Delete data regarding Amazon SES receiving Rules.
3) Delete data regarding Amazon S3 bucket.

Conclusion:

In this blog post, we explained the benefits of verifying a separate email address for the verified domain without setting up an inbox. Having separate identities for different use cases helps in efficient management of bounces, complaints, and delivery. You can setup different IP pools using configuration set for different use cases.

Follow-up:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/manage-incoming-emails-with-ses/
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/receiving-email.html
https://repost.aws/knowledge-center/ses-receive-inbound-emails

About the Author

Ajinkya Bhoite is Cloud Support Engineer II in AWS and Service Matter Expert in Amazon Simple Email Service(SES). Along with Amazon SES, he is an Amazon S3 enthusiast. He loves helping customers in solving issues related to SES and S3 in their environment. He loves reading, writing and running but not in the same order. He has a fictional novel published on Amazon Kindle by the name Shiva Stone: Hampi’s Hidden treasure.

What is a spam trap and why you should care

2023-06-26 Jeremy Pierce

Post Syndicated from Jeremy Pierce original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/what-is-a-spam-trap-and-why-you-should-care/

Introduction

While there are many variations of spam traps, they all share one thing in common: they are all addresses that should not be receiving mail. According to Spamhaus, an industry leader in anti-spam efforts that many ISPs and email service providers refer to and ingest spam trap listing data from, “A spam trap is an email address traditionally used to expose illegitimate senders who add email addresses to their lists without permission. They effectively identify email marketers with poor permission and list management practices.” (https://www.spamhaus.com/resource-center/spamtraps-fix-the-problem-not-the-symptom/). Having been identified as sending mail to a spam trap, a sender may find that a significant portion of their mail will be blocked until the listing has been addressed and removed.

By following the best practices outlined in this post, starting with ensuring you are only sending high quality mail to those that have explicitly requested it and continue to find value in it, you can reduce the potential of sending to a spam trap and avoiding the negative impacts that event can cause.

Spam traps are secret, on purpose

The owners of spam traps keep them secret and never reveal them; this is by design. If a spam trap were to be identified then those not following best practices could simply filter and remove that address from lists thus defeating their purpose. The creation and use of spam traps is to highlight possible issues with data collection, list management, and list hygiene. A sender who has sent to a spam trap may be tempted to try to locate and delete a specific spam trap or traps but this doesn’t solve the issue and is highly unlikely to succeed.

What impact can sending to a spam trap have

The impact can vary, depending on items such as the type of trap you sent to, how many times you sent to it, and how the spam trap owner handles these events. It might result in an immediate, public listing on an RBL (real-time block list). ISPs and email providers subscribe to various block lists as a means of supplementing their own anti-spam methods and processes and often move to block mail from both domains and IP addresses identified as sending to spam traps. For some senders, a public RBL listing will result in a significant amount of their mail being blocked. As email is typically a vital part of how business today operates, this could be devastating and difficult to manage after the fact.

Types of spam traps

Below are many of the most common types of spam traps, but this is not an exhaustive list.

Classic or Pure Spam traps – Classic spam traps are email addresses that were not created or used by a live person, nor available on any website. In some cases, these are addresses at domains that accept mail to any address before the @ (wildcard domains: e.g., *@example.com).
Seeded Traps – Seeded traps are email addresses that anti-spam organizations and others create and purposely plant in various locations online in non-obvious places. The purpose of this “seeding” is to identify when a sender is scraping addresses across the internet and/or has purchased a list from someone who has. This process highlights senders who are sending mail without consent and may not be honoring requests to unsubscribe.
Recycled email addresses – These were once-valid email addresses and are the kind of trap a sender can send to even if every address on their list was originally confirmed opt-in. Recycled spam traps are often quite old addresses that were no longer in use or abandoned by the original owner. Abandoned for so long, in fact, the provider has repurposed it as a trap to identify senders who have not properly maintained the hygiene of their sending lists. This indicates a sender has not been active in keeping lists up to date and pruning inactive subscribers or bounced emails. Often, as part of repurposing these addresses, the provider will ensure the address will bounce for 12 months or more, indicating to the sender that the address is no longer valid and only moving to listing the spam trap and sender after having given them that grace period.
Typo traps – Email addresses that have a typo in the domain, such as @gmial or @yaho, instead of @gmail or @yahoo respectively. These may also be typos in the username, before the @. These may occur when email addresses are collected offline and entered into a database later, or potentially entered incorrectly by the user themselves and was not confirmed. These traps are quite common, but are not “pure” spam traps and anti-spam organizations typically weigh them with this in mind.
Fake addresses – Registration and shopping cart forms often attract fake email addresses. Perhaps an offer is presented on a site that requires an entry, wherein someone enters submits an address like [email protected], which may very well be a spam trap address.

How to avoid sending to spam traps

The first step to avoiding sending to a spam trap is to ensure you are only sending mail to those that have explicitly requested it. Your subscribers should find value in your mail and should fully expect to receive it. The key is getting permission from those users and meeting those expectations. It is strongly recommended that you implement confirmed opt-in or double opt-in, the process of sending a message to the address provided that contains a link or other mechanism for the subscriber to confirm that they approve of the subscription. If there is no response received, that address should not be sent any further mail.

Do not purchase a sending list from a third party. It should go without saying, considering the first step above, however, some senders may be tempted to “kick start” their sending with every intention to transition to best practices but just want a quick boost. This will often result in excessive bounces, recipients marking mail as spam (known as complaints), and ending up with spam traps on sending lists.

Once you have an established list of recipients, addresses that have confirmed opt-in to your mail and value the content you are sending, you need to look at your list management. You should be tracking user engagement for things such as: has a recipient opened your mail recently, has a recipient clicked through a link in your mail, has that user logged in to your site or service. With this tracking in place you should be regularly, preferably automatically, pruning your sending list of non-engaged subscribers. It isn’t recommended to send mail to subscribers who have not engaged for 6 months or longer.

You should also be consistently addressing and removing bounce and complaint addresses. As noted, some spam traps may bounce for 12 months or more before going “live” as a spam trap, providing senders ample time to remove a no longer valid address. This involves tracking and monitoring your sending, ingesting that data, and acting upon those events.

Make sure all webforms have been secured by means such as adding CAPTCHA, in conjunction with confirmed opt-in to help prevent bots from maliciously submitting addresses to your sending lists.

You should immediately honor any and all unsubscribe requests. These addresses may be used by real individuals, and that user may very well be involved in anti-spam efforts and organizations themselves in some way. By not honoring an unsubscribe request you may be sending mail to someone who takes part in blocking decisions, or you may end up with excessive complaints that also negatively impact your sending reputation.

What to do if you have sent to a spam trap

If you haven’t already put in place the methods and best practices above to avoid sending to a spam trap, you should work to immediately implement them. You should also regularly perform rigorous reviews of your data collection and verification practices, identifying and addressing any potential areas of concern or lists/subscribers that cannot be sourced and verified. Segment your lists into recipient activity such as opens, clicks and forwards, immediately removing unengaged addresses for a lesser time frame than what you should already have in place. You may consider performing a permission pass, a one-time campaign to recipients (specifically those left after segmenting and removing of all non-verifiable addresses and older non-engaged recipients) providing users the opportunity to confirm that they would still like to receive mail from you. Only those that have confirmed their subscription status should be kept on future sending lists.

In conclusion

Implementing these best practices, before you begin sending in bulk, can be key in gaining and maintaining a quality sending reputation and is a vital part of successful marketing for businesses both large and small. These processes can significantly improve ROI, mail list quality and integrity, and reduce the possibility of sending to a spam trap, resulting in the best chance of getting your mail in the inboxes of your subscribers

For more information on best practices see:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/best-practices.html

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/handling-bounces-and-complaints/

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/guide-to-maintaining-healthy-email-database/

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/amazon-ses-set-up-notifications-for-bounces-and-complaints/

Solution Overview

Option 1 – SES and EC2 are in a single AWS account

Prerequisites – single AWS account for EC2 and SES

Step 1 – Create IAM Role for EC2 instance with SES Permissions

Step 2 – Attach the IAM Role to EC2 instance.

Step 3 – Create a sample python script that sends emails from the EC2 instance with the attached role.

Option 2 – SES and EC2 are in different AWS accounts

Prerequisites – different AWS accounts for EC2 and SES (use cross-account access)

Step 1 – Create IAM Role in the SES “B” account

Step 2 – Create a IAM policy in the EC2 “A” account that allows this role to assume the SES_Role_for_account_A role you just created in the SES “B” Account.

Step 3 – Create an IAM role in the EC2 “A” account, and attach the previously created IAM policy (EC2_Policy_for_account_B) to it.

Step 4 – Attach the IAM Role (EC2_SES_in_account_B_role) to the EC2 instance in AWS account “A”.

Step 5 – Create a sample python script that sends emails via SES in AWS account “B” from the EC2 instance in AWS account “A” using the EC2 attached role.

Conclusion:

Next Steps:

About the Authors

Manas Murali M

Zip

Introduction to Journaling

SES Mail Manager as Journaling Destination for WorkMail

A cost effective solution at scale

Conclusion

About the Authors

Toby Weir-Jones

Zip

Andy Wong

Bruno Giorgini

Introduction

History and Background of FBLs

Requirements for using Postmaster Tools FBL with SES

Step 1 – Add Your Domain(s) To Google’s Postmaster Tools

Step 2 – Add Feedback-ID headers to your SES emails

Step 3 – Viewing FBL results in Postmaster Tools

Conclusion

Introduction

Customer background and use case

What is an Inbound SMTP Gateway?

Configuring Mail Manager as an Inbound SMTP Gateway

Configuring Mail Manager as an Inbound SMTP Gateway

Conclusion

Alexey Kurbatsky

Zip

Mail manager components definition:

Customer background and use case

Use case 1: Nutrition.co to the world

Use case 2: World to Nutrition.co

Archiving inbound emails

Testing

Conclusion & Next steps

Pavlos Ioannou Katidis

Alexey Kiselev

Use Confirmed Opt-in (AKA, Double Opt-in )

Carefully Monitor Bounces, Complaints, and Delivery Delays

Maintain an Engaged Subscriber List by Removing Inactive Recipients

Track Subscriber Engagement with Amazon SES

Proactively Remove Non-Engaging Subscribers

Consider a “Win-back” Email Campaign

Make Unsubscribing Easy to Maintain a Clean, Compliant List

Build Trust by Growing Your List Organically

Avoid the Temptation of Shortcuts

Focus on Building Your List Organically

Respect Individual Preferences

Land in Inboxes, Not Spam Folders: The Power of Streamlined List Management

About the Authors

The challenge: Managing different email flows efficiently with compliance and security in place

Solution: Amazon SES Mail Manager

Mail Manager features

Ingress Endpoints: Customizable SMTP endpoints for receiving emails

Traffic policies & policy statements

Rule Sets & rules

SMTP Relay

Email Archiving

Email Add-ons

Conclusion:

About the Authors:

Solution Overview

The solution uses:

Solution Flow Details:

Setting up Amazon SES

Verify the sender email address

Step 3 – Create an IAM role in the EC2 “A” account, and attach the previously created IAM policy (`EC2_Policy_for_account_B`) to it.

Step 4 – Attach the IAM Role (`EC2_SES_in_account_B_role`) to the EC2 instance in AWS account “A”.