Tag Archives: Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)

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

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.

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.

How large senders can move from sandbox to production using Amazon SES?

2024-04-02 Medha Karri

Post Syndicated from Medha Karri original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/how-large-senders-can-move-from-sandbox-to-production-using-amazon-ses/

Amazon SES: Email marketing has a potential ROI of $42 for every dollar spent (source link) making it a great tool for businesses whether it is for marketing campaigns, transactional notifications, or other communications. Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is a cloud email service provider that can integrate into any application for bulk email sending. Amazon SES is an email service that supports a variety of use cases like transactional emails, system alerts, marketing/promotional/bulk emails, streamlined internal communications, and emails triggered by CRM system as a few examples.

Your journey with AWS began with creating an AWS account and your journey with Amazon SES likely began in the sandbox environment. To help prevent fraud and abuse, and to help protect your reputation as a sender, Amazon SES places all new accounts in the Amazon SES sandbox. Sandbox helps protect accounts from unauthorized use, accidental sends, and unexpected charges and is a safe space for testing with limited sending capabilities – up to 200 emails per day and a rate of 1 email per second.

Transitioning from Sandbox to Production: When you are ready to scale up to production, the process involves a few steps:

1. Verify your email or domain: Prior to requesting production access, you have to verify an email address or sending domain. You can do that by clicking on Configuration > Verified Identities and click on Create identity button
2. Access the set up page: On the Account dashboard page click on Get started (image 2.1) or go to Get set up page on the navigation frame on the left.
3. Before requesting for production access, it is important to test throttling, bounce handling, and unsubscribe handling.
4. Click on Request production access
5. Production access form: This brings you to the page where you furnish details to get production access
  1. 2. Enter if your mail type is marketing or transactional. Choose the option that best represents the types of messages you plan on sending. A marketing email promotes your products and services, while a transactional email is an immediate, trigger-based communication.
    3. Provide the URL for your website to help us better understand the kind of content you plan on sending.
    4. Use case description: Here is where you mention the following:
      1. Description: What does your company do and what do you plan on communicating with your users/subscribers through email?
      2. Use cases: Describe at a minimum, 1 or 2 of your use cases here and be descriptive of the use-cases you plan to use SES as a sender. You can also paste what a sample email for this use case looks like (please remove sensitive information)
      3. Mailing list: Describe how you plan to build or acquire your mailing list.
      4. Bounces & complaints: Describe how you handle bounces & complaints.
        
        Amazon SES provides you with resources to manage this. This is a guide on how you can set up notifications for bounces and complaints. After you are notified, how do you plan on handling the bounces and complaints?
      5. Unsubscribe: Describe how your email recipients can opt out of receiving email from you. Amazon SES provides subscription management and you can read more about it here. Additionally, you can read more about the latest email sender requirements here.
    5. Best practices:
      1. Success of your email program depends on various metrics such as bounces, complaints and message quality as listed here. Test your setup and your bounce/complaint processing before requesting production access.
      2. Mention if your account was denied earlier and the reasons for denial (any additional information you can provide will help speed up the process).
      3. Provide your daily and weekly email volumes.
      4. Provide your peak volume throughput or TPS (transactions/emails per second).
      5. We consider each request carefully. Therefore, it is important to provide specifics and not vague messages like “Please remove from sandbox and move to production” or “Please increase sending limit to 40 emails/sec”
      6. More best practices here.

Conclusion: Successfully moving from the sandbox to production in Amazon SES marks a significant step in leveraging email communication for your business. It’s not just about scaling your email capabilities; it’s about enhancing your engagement with customers and prospects through reliable, efficient email delivery. Continuously monitor your email performance, stay updated with Amazon SES features, and adapt your strategy to ensure your email campaigns remain effective and compliant. With these steps and insights, you’re well-equipped to make the most out of Amazon SES, turning it into a vital component of your digital communication strategy. Once your request has been approved, you’ll receive a confirmation from Amazon SES, and you’ll be ready to start sending emails to real recipients.

About the authors:

Medha Karri is a Senior Product Manager at Amazon Simple Email Service at AWS. He is a technology enthusiast having varied experience in product management and software development. He is passionate to simplify complex technical solutions for customers and enjoys playing Xbox in his free time.

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.

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.

Using one-click unsubscribe with Amazon SES

2024-02-06 Pavlos Ioannou Katidis

Post Syndicated from Pavlos Ioannou Katidis original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/using-one-click-unsubscribe-with-amazon-ses/

Gmail and Yahoo have announced new requirements for bulk senders that take effect in February 2024. The requirements aim to reduce delivery of malicious or unwanted email to the users of these mailbox providers. We recommend that Amazon SES senders who operate outside of the SES sandbox assume these bulk sender requirements apply to them.

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.

This blog presents a reference architecture for Amazon SES senders who independently manage email subscriptions outside of Amazon SES. Alternatively, Amazon SES senders can employ our native subscription management capability as part of their compliance with the Gmail and Yahoo bulk sender requirements. Note that the scope of Gmail and Yahoo’s bulk sender requirements extends beyond enabling an easy unsubscribe method. Read our blogs on email authentication and managing spam complaints for more information that will help you successfully operate as a bulk sender with Amazon SES.

Email headers contain metadata that describes the content, sender, relay path, destination, and other elements of an email. The bulk sender easy subscription requirement references use of the List-Unsubscribe email header (RFC2369) and List-Unsubscribe-Post email header (RFC8058). The order of the headers should be first the List-Unsubscribe followed by the List-Unsubscribe-Post.

List-Unsubscribe: <https://nutrition.co/?address=x&topic=x>, <mailto:unsubscribe@ nutrition.co?subject=TopicUnsubscribe>
List-Unsubscribe-Post: List-Unsubscribe=One-Click

These headers enable email clients and inbox providers to display an unsubscribe link at the top of the email if they support it. This could take the form of a menu item, push button, or another user interface element to simplify the user experience – see the Gmail client screenshot below.

gmail-inbox

Unsubscribing can take place from the email footer by clicking on a hyperlink, and/or from an unsubscribe link that mailbox providers render. These different unsubscribe methods can be custom-built or provided by Amazon SES.

Unsubscribe method footer: An unsubscribe link in the email footer, which redirects recipients to a landing page, where they can unsubscribe or edit their communication preferences.
Unsubscribe method header: A hyperlink that is rendered by the mailbox provider based on the List-Unsubscribe email header. Recipients can use this link to unsubscribe from that sender.
Amazon SES unsubscribe method: The Amazon SES subscription management feature, which provides subscription management via the List-Unsubscribe header and ListManagementOptions footer links.
Custom-built unsubscribe method: A custom-built unsubscribe link in the email footer and manually added List-Unsubscribe header.

The table below lists all unsubscribe method combinations, indicating if they are custom-built or provided by Amazon SES and whether they comply with the easy unsubscription requirement from Google and Yahoo.

Unsubscribe method	Amazon SES or custom-built	Complies with Gmail & Yahoo
Footer & Header	Amazon SES	Yes
Footer & Header	Custom	Yes
Header	Custom	Yes
Footer	Custom	Partial

Failing to comply with the easy unsubscription requirement mailbox providers such as Gmail and Yahoo will start rejecting non-compliant emails.

Note: Gmail might not show the easy unsubscribe link. This might happen because Gmail shows the link if they trust that the sender is honoring the unsubscribe requests and not attempting to track recipients. We recommend senders continue to provide the unsubscribe link in an easy to find location of the body of the message.

Implementing the unsubscribe header has many benefits for you:

Reduces spam complaint rate: Email recipients will click on “Report as SPAM” if they find it difficult to unsubscribe. A high spam complaint rate makes mailbox providers more likely to block your sending. Making unsubscribe easier can improve deliverability.
It can increase the trust in your brand: The fact that it is easy for recipients to unsubscribe could be seen as evidence that the content is valuable enough that the company believes people will want to stay subscribed.
Reduces issues with false suppression: Senders that rely solely on account-level suppression lists could suppress all email sending to an address even though the recipient may wish to receive other types of email from the account. Offering an easy unsubscribe method allows recipients to indicate which type of email they would like to receive and not receive based on topic or category.

There are two types of list-unsubscribe options:

Mailto: unsubscribe requests come in the form of an email sent from the mailbox provider to the email address specified on the List-Unsubscribe header. The process of managing unsubscribe emails can be automated with SES inbound.
URL unsubscribe link: redirects recipients to an unsubscribe landing page, from where they can edit further their communication preferences. Adding the List-Unsubscribe-Post email header, senders can provide recipients with one-click unsubscribe experience, which doesn’t require them to visit a landing page.

The mailto option is supported by many mailbox providers and it’s recommended to include it in addition to the URL in the List-Unsubscribe email header and the unsubscribe link in the email footer.

One-click unsubscribe for Amazon SES

This section guides you on how to use Amazon SES V2 SendEmail API operation for email sending and describes how to use other AWS services to effectively manage each kind of unsubscribe request.

The architecture covers both easy unsubscribe options, mailto and URL. This is because not all mailbox providers support the List-Unsubscribe-Post header. The architecture, assumes that Amazon SES has email receiving enabled for the unsubscribe email address used in the List-Unsubscribe mailto header and your recipient preferences can be updated via an API.

The reference architecture diagram illustrates the AWS services used and how they interact with each other to process a recipient’s unsubscribe request:

AWS KMS: is a managed service that makes it easy for you to create and control the cryptographic keys that are used to protect your data.
Amazon API Gateway: Is a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale.
AWS Lambda: Compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the compute resources.

The first part of the process is described in detail below:

email-sending-flow

Compliant emails should include the List-Unsubscribe and List-Unsubscribe-Post headers. This can be achieved with the Amazon SES SendEmail V2 API operation. Using MIME standard, build a MIME message containing the headers, subject and body. The MIME message will be in the SES V2 SendEmail API request body under Content => Raw field – see code example below. Amazon SES is planning to extend the SendEmail V2 API to natively support unsubscribe email headers. The unsubscribe email address and URL contain the recipient’s email address and email subject parameters, which are encrypted using AWS Key Management Service. These parameters are used later on to identify and unsubscribe the recipient from a specific topic.
1. The email domain used to send emails needs to be first verified successfully – see here how to create and verify identities in SES.
2. Gmail uses the Friendly From value to populate the unsubscribe pop-up message. Friendly From is the part of the From header that is displayed to the recipient (not the email address) “To stop getting messages like this one, go to the <Friendly From> website to unsubscribe. Learn more.”. If you see Unknown or experience other issues, ensure that the From header of your messages conforms to RFC5322.
```
	msg = MIMEMultipart()
	msg.add_header('List-Unsubscribe','<https://nutrition.co/?address=x&topic=x>, <mailto: [email protected]?subject=TopicUnsubscribe>')
	msg.add_header('List-Unsubscribe-Post','List-Unsubscribe=One-Click')
	msg.attach(MIMEText("Welcome to Nutrition.co", 'plain')) 
	msg['Subject'] = "Welcome to Nutrition.co"

	response = sesv2.send_email(
	  FromEmailAddress='Nutrition.co <[email protected]>',
	  Destination={'ToAddresses': ['[email protected]']},
	  Content={
		  'Raw': {
			  'Data': msg.as_string()
		  },
	  },
	  ConfigurationSetName='ConfigSet'
	)
```
3. Amazon Pinpoint senders need to use Custom channel instead of Amazon Pinpoint’s native email channel. Custom channel gives the flexibility to invoke an AWS Lambda function and execute custom code such as calling Amazon Pinpoint’s send_messages API operation. Using Amazon Pinpoint’s send_messages API operation you can specify an endpoint as the recipient and add the email content and the List-Unsubscribe and List-Unsubscribe-Post headers in a MIME message under the RawEmail => Data field – see below a code example:
```
	msg = MIMEMultipart()
	msg.add_header('List-Unsubscribe','<https://nutrition.co/?address=x&topic=x>, <mailto: [email protected]?subject=TopicUnsubscribe>')
	msg.add_header('List-Unsubscribe-Post','List-Unsubscribe=One-Click')
	msg.attach(MIMEText("Welcome to Nutrition.co", 'plain')) 
	msg['Subject'] = "Welcome to Nutrition.co"

	endpoint_id = "endpoint_id"
	application_id = "application_id"

	response = pinpoint.send_messages(
	ApplicationId = application_id,
	MessageRequest = {
		'Endpoints': {
			endpoint_id: {}
		},
		'MessageConfiguration': {
		'EmailMessage': {
			'FromAddress': 'Nutrition.co <[email protected]>',
			'RawEmail': {
				'Data': msg.as_string()
			}
		}
	  }
	})
```
The email recipients whose mailbox provider supports List-Unsubscribe, such as Gmail & Yahoo, will see an Unsubscribe hyperlink next to the sender details as shown in the screenshot below.

gmail-inbox

So far, we have talked about how to craft and employ the headers for presenting mail recipients with an easy unsubscribe option. In the following sections, we’ll walk through the two options for sending the unsubscribe request back to the sender.

The first option uses only the List-Unsubscribe header and only specifies the mailto email address to receive unsubscribe requests. The second option uses both the List-Unsubscribe and the List-Unsubscribe-Post headers. The unsubscribe requests are made with a POST API call to an endpoint provided in the List-Unsubscribe header.

When the recipient clicks on the Unsubscribe call to action next to the sender’s information, a pop-up appears asking for final confirmation using either option – see screenshot below.

unsubscribe-pop-up

Scenario – List-Unsubscribe

list-unsubscribe-scenario

The recipient clicks on the Unsubscribe call to action next to the sender’s details and again on Unsubscribe on the pop-up.
The mailbox provider sends an email to the email address specified in the header List-Unsubscribe => mailto. Amazon SES can be configured to receive emails for the unsubscribe email address, the Amazon SES receipt rule Invoke Lambda function action.
An AWS Lambda function gets invoked. The payload contains all email headers and omits the email body as well as any attachments. The AWS Lambda function uses the AWS KMS key to decrypt the email subject, which contains the topic the recipient wants to unsubscribe from. Depending where your recipient preferences are stored, you can expand the AWS Lambda function code to update the recipients’ communication preferences.

Scenario – List-Unsubscribe & List-Unsubscribe-Post

list-unsubscribe-post-scenario

The recipient clicks on the Unsubscribe call to action next to the sender’s details and again on Unsubscribe on the pop-up.
The mailbox provider performs a POST API call to the URL provided in the List-Unsubscribe header. In this architecture, the URL is an Amazon API Gateway endpoint with an AWS Lambda integration.
An AWS Lambda function gets invoked, which uses the AWS KMS key to decrypt the email address and topic stored in the URL parameters. Depending where your recipient preferences are stored, you can expand the AWS Lambda function code to update the recipients’ communication preferences. The code in the AWS Lambda function serves two purposes 1) processing a POST request to unsubscribe the recipient and 2) processing a GET request to redirect the recipient to page on your website (Gmail specific). Use a micro web framework like Flask to process unsubscribe requests and accordingly redirect recipients to a page of your website.

In Gmail, to view the Go to website call to action, recipients need to first Unsubscribe and then and then click on Unsubscribe again – see diagram below.

unsubscribe-flow-gmail

Conclusion

In this blog you learned how to configure Amazon SES to manage One-click unsubscribe requests when not using SES’s subscription management feature. The reference architecture shows how to structure and add the List-Unsubscribe and List-Unsubscribe-Post email headers when sending emails as well as how to manage unsubscribe requests generated from these email headers respectively. In addition to the List-Unsubscribe and List-Unsubscribe-Post email headers, we recommend (continue) using the footer unsubscribe link.

Easy unsubscribe benefits both the sender and recipient. It is one of the Gmail and Yahoo’s bulk sender requirements announced back in October 2023. 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.

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 to secure your email account and improve email sender reputation

2023-09-14 bajavani

Post Syndicated from bajavani original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/how-to-secure-your-email-account-and-improve-email-sender-reputation/

How to secure your email account and improve email sender reputation

Introduction

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is a cost-effective, flexible, and scalable email service that enables customers to send email from within any application. You can send email using the SES SMTP interface or via HTTP requests to the SES API. All requests to send email must be authenticated using either SMTP or IAM credentials and it is when these credentials end up in the hands of a malicious actor, that customers need to act fast to secure their SES account.

Compromised credentials with permission to send email via SES allows the malicious actor to use SES to send spam and or phishing emails, which can lead to high bounce and or complaint rates for the SES account. A consequence of high bounce and or complaint rates can result in sending for the SES account being paused.

How to identify if your SES email sending account is compromised

Start by checking the reputation metrics for the SES account from the Reputation metrics menu in the SES Console.
A sudden increase or spike in the bounce or complaint metrics should be further investigated. You can start by checking the Feedback forwarding destination, where SES will send bounce and or complaints to. Feedback on bounces and complaints will contain the From, To email addresses as well as the subject. Use these attributes to determine if unintended emails are being sent, for example if the bounce and / or complaint recipients are not known to you that is an indication of compromise. To find out what your feedback forwarding destination is, please see Feedback forwarding mechanism

If SNS notifications are already enabled, check the subscribed endpoint for the bounce and / or complaint notifications to review the notifications for unintended email sending. SNS notifications would provide additional information, such as IAM identity being used to send the emails as well as the source IP address the emails are being sent from.

If the review of the bounces or complaints leads to the conclusion that the email sending is unintended, immediately follow the steps below to secure your account.

Steps to secure your account:

You can follow the below steps in order to secure your SES account:

It is recommended that to avoid any more unintended emails from being sent, to immediately pause the SES account until the root cause has been identified and steps taken to secure the SES account. You can use the below command to pause the email sending for your account:
aws ses update-account-sending-enabled --no-enabled --region sending_region
Note: Change the sending_region with the region you are using to send email.
Rotate the credentials for the IAM identity being used to send the unintended emails. If the IAM identity was originally created from the SES Console as SMTP credentials, it is recommended to delete the IAM identity and create new SMTP credentials from the SES Console.
Limit the scope of SMTP/IAM identity to send email only from the specific IP address your email sending originates from.

See controlling access to Amazon SES.

Below is an example of an IAM policy which allows emails from IP Address 1.2.3.4 and 5.6.7.8 only.

————————-

{
"Version": "2012-10-17",
"Statement": [
{
"Sid": "RestrictIP",
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": "ses:SendRawEmail",
"Resource": "*",
"Condition": {
"IpAddress": {
"aws:SourceIp": [
"1.2.3.4/32",
"5.6.7.8/32"
]
}
}
}
]
}

———————————

When you send an email from IP address apart from the IP mentioned in the policy, then the following error will be observed and the email sending request will fail:

———-

554 Access denied: User arn:aws:iam::123456789012:user/iam-user-name’ is not authorized to perform ses:SendRawEmail’ on resource `arn:aws:ses:eu-west-1:123456789012:identity/example.com’

———-

4. Once these steps have been taken, the sending for the account can be enabled again, using the command below:

aws ses update-account-sending-enabled --enabled --region sending_region

Conclusion

You can secure your SES email sending account by taking the necessary steps mentioned and also prevent this from happening in the future.

AWS Weekly Roundup: Farewell EC2-Classic, EBS at 15 Years, and More (Sept. 4, 2023)

2023-09-05 Channy Yun

Post Syndicated from Channy Yun original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-farewell-ec2-classic-ebs-at-15-years-and-more-sept-4-2023/

Last week, there was some great reading about Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) written by AWS tech leaders.

Dr. Werner Vogels wrote Farewell EC2-Classic, it’s been swell, celebrating the 17 years of loyal duty of the original version that started what we now know as cloud computing. You can read how it made the process of acquiring compute resources simple, even though the stack running behind the scenes was incredibly complex.

We have come a long way since 2006, and we’re not done innovating for our customers. As celebrated in this year’s AWS Storage Day, Amazon EBS was launched 15 years ago this month. James Hamilton, SVP and distinguished engineer at Amazon, wrote Amazon EBS at 15 Years, about how the service has evolved to handle over 100 trillion I/O operations a day, and transfers over 13 exabytes of data daily.

As Dr. Werner said in his piece, “it’s a reminder that building evolvable systems is a strategy, and revisiting your architectures with an open mind is a must.” Our innovation efforts driven by customer feedback continue today, and this week is no different.

Last Week’s Launches
Here are some launches that got my attention:

Renaming Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics to Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink – You can now use Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink, a fully managed and serverless service for you to build and run real-time streaming applications using Apache Flink. All your existing running applications in Kinesis Data Analytics will work as-is, without any changes. To learn more, see my blog post.

Extended Support for Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS – You can now get more time for support, up to three years, for Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS database instances running MySQL 5.7, PostgreSQL 11, and higher major versions. This e will allow you time to upgrade to a new major version to help you meet your business requirements even after the community ends support for these versions.

Enhanced Starter Template for AWS Step Functions Workflow Studio – You can now use starter templates to streamline the process of creating and prototyping workflows swiftly, plus a new code mode, which enables builders to move easily between design and code authoring views. With the improved authoring experience in Workflow Studio, you can seamlessly alternate between a drag-and-drop visual builder experience or the new code editor so that you can pick your preferred tool to accelerate development.

To learn more, see Enhancing Workflow Studio with new features for streamlined authoring in the AWS Compute Blog.

Email Delivery History for Every Email in Amazon SES – You can now troubleshoot individual email delivery problems, confirm delivery of critical messages, and identify engaged recipients on a granular, single email basis. Email senders can investigate trends in delivery performance and see delivery and engagement status for each email sent using Amazon SES Virtual Deliverability Manager.

Response Streaming through Amazon SageMaker Real-time Inference – You can now continuously stream inference responses back to the client to help you build interactive experiences for various generative AI applications such as chatbots, virtual assistants, and music generators.

For more details on how to use response streaming along with examples, see Invoke to Stream an Inference Response and How containers should respond in the AWS documentation, and Elevating the generative AI experience: Introducing streaming support in Amazon SageMaker hosting in the AWS Machine Learning Blog.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

Other AWS News
Some other updates and news that you might have missed:

AI & Sports: How AWS & the NFL are Changing the Game – Over the last 5 years, AWS has partnered with the National Football League (NFL), helping fans better understand the game, helping broadcasters tell better stories, and helping teams use data to improve operations and player safety. Watch AWS CEO, Adam Selipsky, former NFL All-Pro Larry Fitzgerald, and the NFL Network’s Cynthia Frelund during their earlier livestream discussing the intersection of artificial intelligence and machine learning in sports.

Amazon Bedrock Story from Amazon Science – This is a good article explaining the benefits of using Amazon Bedrock to build and scale generative AI applications with leading foundation models, including Amazon’s Titan FMs, which focus on responsible AI to avoid toxic content.

Amazon EC2 Flexibility Score – This is an open source tool developed by AWS to assess any configuration used to launch instances through an Auto Scaling Group (ASG) against the recommended EC2 best practices. It converts the best practice adoption into a “flexibility score” that can be used to identify, improve, and monitor the configurations.

To learn more open-source news and updates, see this newsletter curated by my colleague Ricardo to bring you the latest open source projects, posts, events, and more.

Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events:

AWS re:Invent – Ready to start planning your re:Invent? Browse the session catalog now. Join us to hear the latest from AWS, learn from experts, and connect with the global cloud community.

AWS Global Summits – The last in-person AWS Summit will be held in Johannesburg on Sept. 26.

AWS Community Days – Join a community-led conference run by AWS user group leaders in your region: Aotearoa (Sept. 6), Lebanon (Sept. 9), Munich (Sept. 14), Argentina (Sept. 16), Spain (Sept. 23), and Chile (Sept. 30). Visit the landing page to check out all the upcoming AWS Community Days.

CDK Day – A community-led fully virtual event on Sept. 29 with tracks in English and Spanish about CDK and related projects. Learn more at the website.

You can browse all upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events, and developer-focused events such as AWS DevDay.

— Channy

This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

Prime Day 2023 Powered by AWS – All the Numbers

2023-08-02 Jeff Barr

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/prime-day-2023-powered-by-aws-all-the-numbers/

As part of my annual tradition to tell you about how AWS makes Prime Day possible, I am happy to be able to share some chart-topping metrics (check out my 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022 posts for a look back).

This year I bought all kinds of stuff for my hobbies including a small drill press, filament for my 3D printer, and irrigation tools. I also bought some very nice Alphablock books for my grandkids. According to our official release, the first day of Prime Day was the single largest sales day ever on Amazon and for independent sellers, with more than 375 million items purchased.

Prime Day by the Numbers
As always, Prime Day was powered by AWS. Here are some of the most interesting and/or mind-blowing metrics:

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) – The Amazon Prime Day event resulted in an incremental 163 petabytes of EBS storage capacity allocated – generating a peak of 15.35 trillion requests and 764 petabytes of data transfer per day. Compared to the previous year, Amazon increased the peak usage on EBS by only 7% Year-over-Year yet delivered +35% more traffic per day due to efficiency efforts including workload optimization using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) AWS Graviton-based instances. Here’s a visual comparison:

AWS CloudTrail – AWS CloudTrail processed over 830 billion events in support of Prime Day 2023.

Amazon DynamoDB – DynamoDB powers multiple high-traffic Amazon properties and systems including Alexa, the Amazon.com sites, and all Amazon fulfillment centers. Over the course of Prime Day, these sources made trillions of calls to the DynamoDB API. DynamoDB maintained high availability while delivering single-digit millisecond responses and peaking at 126 million requests per second.

Amazon Aurora – On Prime Day, 5,835 database instances running the PostgreSQL-compatible and MySQL-compatible editions of Amazon Aurora processed 318 billion transactions, stored 2,140 terabytes of data, and transferred 836 terabytes of data.

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) – Amazon SES sent 56% more emails for Amazon.com during Prime Day 2023 vs. 2022, delivering 99.8% of those emails to customers.

Amazon CloudFront – Amazon CloudFront handled a peak load of over 500 million HTTP requests per minute, for a total of over 1 trillion HTTP requests during Prime Day.

Amazon SQS – During Prime Day, Amazon SQS set a new traffic record by processing 86 million messages per second at peak. This is 22% increase from Prime Day of 2022, where SQS supported 70.5M messages/sec.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) – During Prime Day 2023, Amazon used tens of millions of normalized AWS Graviton-based Amazon EC2 instances, 2.7x more than in 2022, to power over 2,600 services. By using more Graviton-based instances, Amazon was able to get the compute capacity needed while using up to 60% less energy.

Amazon Pinpoint – Amazon Pinpoint sent tens of millions of SMS messages to customers during Prime Day 2023 with a delivery success rate of 98.3%.

Prepare to Scale
Every year I reiterate the same message: rigorous preparation is key to the success of Prime Day and our other large-scale events. If you are preparing for a similar chart-topping event of your own, I strongly recommend that you take advantage of AWS Infrastructure Event Management (IEM). As part of an IEM engagement, my colleagues will provide you with architectural and operational guidance that will help you to execute your event with confidence!

— Jeff;

Amazon Simple Email Service adds email delivery features to revised free tier

2023-07-19 sakoppes

Post Syndicated from sakoppes original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/amazon-simple-email-service-adds-email-delivery-analysis-features-to-revised-free-tier/

On August 1st, 2023, Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) will launch a revised, more flexible free tier that allows AWS customers to try more SES features without commitment or cost. SES customers will be able to send or receive up to 3,000 messages each month for a year after they begin using SES, free of charge[1]. Customers can now try advanced SES capabilities, like deliverability analytics and optimization through Virtual Deliverability Manager (VDM), in the free tier. With access to these new features, customers can use the free tier to build full proof-of-concept workloads to experiment with SES’ powerful tools.

How did the SES free tier work previously?

Previously, the SES free tier only covered outbound messages sent from AWS compute services such as EC2 instances. Customers using other types of computing services for sending outbound messages had no SES free tier available. Customers could also receive up to 1,000 inbound email messages free each month. Customers evaluating SES had to pay to explore more advanced features like Virtual Deliverability Manager, a suite of tools customers use to improve delivery rates for outbound emails. This made it difficult to avoid charges when exploring advanced SES use cases, such as when building prototype email sending workloads to explore ways to monitor and optimize email delivery success and engagement rates.

New email deliverability features in the SES free tier

The revised SES free tier offers a more flexible model, introducing a shared limit which applies to pay-as-you-go message charges including inbound email messages, outbound email messages sent from any source, and email charges for Virtual Deliverability Manager. This model makes it easier to choose the right combination of features to fit your use cases when exploring SES features end-to-end without commitment. The revised free tier includes up to 3,000 messages each month for 12 months after you start using SES, which are shared across the features included in the revised SES free tier (note that Virtual Deliverability Manager counts separately from outbound messages). Here some examples to illustrate the revised free tier (all numbers are messages per month), note the 3,000 message free tier is applied first to more expensive charges (e.g. outbound messages) in situations where multiple products are in use (inbound, outbound, Virtual Deliverability Manager):

A few examples of how the Simple Email Service (SES) revised free tier is applied.

What can you do with the revised free tier?

The revised SES free tier makes it easier to build proof-of-concept workflows to demonstrate SES’ advanced deliverability optimization capabilities without commitment. For example, you could set up a pilot workload to show how SES can help you interpret the results of A/B testing using configuration sets. Imagine creating a few versions of a marketing email, then sending each version to a sample set of recipients to test response rates. You could track each version of the email separately in Virtual Deliverability Manager using configuration sets (essentially a campaign), then use VDM to analyze the differences in deliverability metrics for each campaign. You can look at the bounce rates, open, and click rates of each campaign to determine which version performed best before sending to all your target customers. This helps you see what SES can do, before deciding whether you want to build production workloads on SES.

What’s next?

The revised SES free tier will be active on August 1st, 2023 for all SES customers; no action is required. Customers who are using SES today will benefit from the revised free tier for one year (until August 2024). Customers who start using SES after August 1st, 2023, will benefit from the revised free tier for one year from the month they start using SES. The revised free tier replaces the current free tier, and we are not able to offer an opportunity to continue using current free tier. To start using the SES free tier, just create and verify an email address to send outbound email messages, and/or set up a receipt rule for receiving inbound email messages. To see advanced analytics with deliverability recommendations and traffic shaping through Virtual Deliverability Manager, just click on “Virtual Deliverability Manager” in the SES console navigation and follow the steps to enable it.

Get started with SES free tier at https://aws.amazon.com/ses/.

[1] Data transfer charges for emails sent and attachment charges still apply.

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

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.

How to Grant Another SES Account or User Permission To Send Emails

2023-06-30 bajavani

Post Syndicated from bajavani original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/how-to-grant-another-ses-account-or-user-permission-to-send-emails/

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is a bulk and transactional email sending service for businesses and developers. To send emails from a particular email address through SES, users have to verify ownership of the email address, the domain used by the email address, or a parent domain of the domain used by the email address. This is referred to as an identity and is treated as a user-owned resource by SES.

For example, to send an email from [email protected], the user must verify ownership of the email address [email protected], the subdomain mail.example.com, or the domain example.com. Only identity owners are allowed to send emails from email addresses covered by their identities.

Why use the sending authorization feature in email?

This post will show you how you can grant another account or user to send emails from the identity that you own . By using sending authorization , you can authorize other users to send emails from the identities that you own using their Amazon SES accounts . In this blog post I’d like to walk you through how to setup sending authorization and addressing common concerns regarding the same.

With sending authorization, you can verify the identity under a single account and then grant the other accounts/users permission to send emails from that verified identity.

Let’s look at the below use case :

For example, if you’re a business owner who has collaborated with a email marketing company to send emails from your domain but you would like that only the domain you own should be verified in your account whereas , the email sending, and the monitoring of those emails ( bounce/complaint/delivery notifications for the emails) should be taken care by the email marketing company itself.

With sending authorization, the business owner can verify the identity in their SES account and provide the necessary permissions to the user of the email marketing company in order to send emails using their domain .

Before we proceed further , there are two important terms shared below which you should know that are used throughout the blog:

Delegate Sender : The user that will be using the verified identity from another account to send email.

Identity Owner : The account where the identity is verified . A policy is attached to an identity to specify who may send for that identity and under which conditions. You can refer the SES developer guide to know more

Overview of solution

If you want to enable a delegate sender to send on your behalf, you create a sending authorization policy and associate the policy to your identity by using the Amazon SES console or the Amazon SES API.
When the delegate sender attempts to send an email through Amazon SES on your behalf, the delegate sender passes the ARN of your identity in the request or in the header of the email as you can see from the Figure 1 shared below. Figure 1 shows the architecture of the sending authorization process.

Figure 1: High Level Overview of Sending Authorization Process

3. When Amazon SES receives the request to send the email, it checks your identity’s policy (if present) to determine if you have authorized the delegate sender to send on the identity’s behalf. If the delegate sender is authorized, Amazon SES accepts the email; otherwise, Amazon SES returns an error message. The error message is similar to error message :“ AccessDenied: User is not authorized to perform ses sendemail”

Walkthrough

In this section, you’ll learn the steps needed to setup email sending authorization:

Create a IAM user in Delegate Sender Account with the necessary email sending permissions.You can read more about the necessary email sending permission in our developer guide
Verify Identity in Identity Owner Account which will be used by the Delegate Sender account later to send email.
Set up Identity policy to authorize the Delegate Sender Account to send emails using an email address or domain (an identity) owned by Identity Owner Account. The below steps illustrates how you can setup the identity policy .
1. In order to add the identity policy , go to the Verified-identities screen of the SES console, select the verified identity you wish to authorize for the delegate sender to send on your behalf.
2. Choose the verified identity’s Authorization tab. Please refer the below screenshot for reference :

Choose the verified identity's Authorization tab

You can use both policy generator or create a custom policy .

In the Authorization policies pane, if you wish to use the policy generator to create the policy then you can select Use policy generator from the drop-down. You can create the sending authorization policy depending on your use case . The below screenshot demonstrates the policy generator view :

policy generator view

You can also create the policy using the option “create custom policy ” . Please see the below screenshot for reference for a sample policy :

Add the identity policy to the verified identity in Identity owner account . Check the sample policy below for reference :

{
“Version”: “2008-10-17”,
“Statement”: [
{
“Sid”: “stmt1532578375047”,
“Effect”: “Allow”,
“Principal”: {
“AWS”: “<write ARN of user belonging to Delegate sender account>”
},
“Action”: [
“ses:SendEmail”,
“ses:SendRawEmail”
],
“Resource”: “<write ARN of the identity verified in Identity owner Account >”
}
]
}

Note: Please make sure to write the ARN’s for the Principal and the Resource in the above given sample policy.

3.Click on Apply policy after you have reviewed the authorization policy.

You can use the policy generator to create a sending authorization policy or use Amazon SES API or console to create a custom policy . This policy can also restrict usage based on different conditions . A condition is any restriction about the permission in the statement. A key is the specific characteristic that’s the basis for access restriction .

For more information , you can refer Sending-authorization-policy-examples.

4. Send email from Account B using the source ARN of the identity of Account A .
Here we will be sending emails using the send-email api command using AWS CLI . When you send an email using the Amazon SES API, you specify the content of the message, and Amazon SES assembles a MIME email for you.

This blogpost assumes that you have installed and configured AWS CLI on your terminal. For more information on Installing or updating the latest version of the AWS CLI, refer this link.

aws ses send-email –source-arn “arn:aws:ses:us-east-1:XXXXXXXXX:identity/example.com” –from [email protected] –to [email protected] –text “This is for those who cannot read HTML.” –html “<h1>Hello World</h1><p>This is a pretty mail with HTML formatting</p>” –subject “Hello World”

Replace the From address , To address and source ARN (identity ARN from identity owner account) in the above command.

Once the email request is sent to SES , SES will acknowledge it with a Message ID. This Message ID is a string of characters that uniquely identifies the request and looks something like this: “000001271b15238a-fd3ae762-2563-11df-8cd4-6d4e828a9ae8-000000” .

If you are using SMTP interface for delegate sending, you have to add the authorisation policy in the SMTP user and include the X-SES-SOURCE-ARN, X-SES-FROM-ARN, and X-SES-RETURN-PATH-ARN headers in your message. Pass these headers after you issue the DATA command in the SMTP conversation.

Notifications in case of email sending authorization

If you authorize a delegate sender to send email on your behalf, Amazon SES counts all bounces or complaints that those emails generate toward the delegate sender’s bounce and complaint limits, rather than the identity owner. However, if your IP address appears on third-party anti-spam, DNS-based Blackhole Lists (DNSBLs) as a result of messages sent by a delegate sender, the reputation of your identities may be damaged. For this reason, if you’re an identity owner, you should set up email feedback forwarding for all your identities, including those that you’ve authorized for delegate sending.

For setting up notifications for Identity owner , refer the steps mentioned in the SES developer guide

Delegate senders can and should set up their own bounce and complaint notifications for the identities that you have authorized them to use. They can set up event publishing to to publish bounce and complaint events to an Amazon SNS topic or a Kinesis Data Firehose stream.

Note : If neither the identity owner nor the delegate sender sets up a method of sending notifications for bounce and complaint events, or if the sender doesn’t apply the configuration set that uses the event publishing rule, then Amazon SES automatically sends event notifications by email to the address in the Return-Path field of the email (or the address in the Source field, if you didn’t specify a Return-Path address), even if you disabled email feedback forwarding

Cleaning up resources:

To remove the resources created by this solution:

You can delete the verified identities from Idenitity owner account if you no longer wish to send emails from that verified identity. You can check the SES developer guide for steps for deleting the verified identity .

Frequently Asked Questions

Q.1 If my delegate sender account is in sandbox, can I send emails from the delegate sender account to non-verified addresses ?

Sanbox Restriction : If delegate sender account is in sandbox mode then you need to submit a limit increase case to move the Delegate sender account out of Sandbox mode to “get rid of the Sandbox limitations“. The AWS account of the delegate sender has to be removed from the sandbox before it can be used to send email to non-verified addresses.

If delegate sender account is in sandbox mode, you will face the following error while email sending to unverified identities :

An error occurred (MessageRejected) when calling the SendEmail operation: Email address is not verified. The following identities failed the check in region US-EAST-1 [email protected]

However , you can sent email to verified identities successfully from the delegate sender account in case of sandbox access .

Q2. Is it necessary to have production access in identity owner account ?
It is not necessary to have the Identity owner account to have production access for using Sending authorization.

Q.3 Will the delegate sender account or the identity owner get charged for the emails sent using sending authorization ?

Billing : Emails sent from the delegate sender account are billed to delegate sender account .

Reputation and sending quota : Cross-account emails count against the delegate’s sending limits, so the delegate is responsible for applying for any sending limit increases they might need. Similarly, delegated emails get charged to the delegate’s account, and any bounces and complaints count against the delegate’s reputation.

Region : The delegate sender must send the emails from the AWS Region in which the identity owner’s identity is verified.

Conclusion:

By using Sending Authorization, identity owners will be able to grant delegate senders the permission to send emails through their own verified identities in SES. With the sending authorization feature, you will have complete control over your identities so that you can change or revoke permissions at any time.

How To Build an Email Service on SES

2023-06-30 tweirjon

Post Syndicated from tweirjon original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/how-to-build-an-email-service-on-ses/

Foundations

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) handles hundreds of billions of email messages every month. While many are outbound, one of the fastest-growing parts of the business is for inbound traffic. Customers send and receive email via SES using a combination of public SMTP interfaces and the SES SDK. Traditionally, most customers used SES alongside their existing corporate mail systems, but did you know it’s possible to build a complete email service with SES at its core? In fact, it’s already been done – it’s known as Amazon WorkMail, and it provides mailbox and calendar services to tens of thousands of customers (and millions of mailboxes) around the world.

Ingredients for Success

Email transport depends on a few core components. First of all, you have to be a reputable sender, or the receiving email systems are going to reject anything you try to send. You also have to be insulated against spurious reports of abuse, so that one bad apple can’t take down the entire service for everyone. The solution for both of those issues is the same: have an enormous number of public Mail Transfer Agents (MTAs), and manage their IP reputations actively. If someone reports spam coming from one of those IPs, and it gets added to a block list somewhere on the internet, you have to have a rapid response mechanism to engage with the block list operator and take their prescribed steps to clean up the entry.

The Highest Standards of Security

Similarly, you have to consult those same block lists when mail is sent to your own systems from anywhere on the internet. Inbound email is subjected to a variety of authentication steps before it’s released for delivery to a destination. Quality providers will leverage checks called SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail). SPF is designed to prevent malicious senders from masquerading as other domains, and DKIM enables a receiving system to validate the authenticity of the sender and to confirm it hasn’t been manipulated while in transit. If either of these checks fail, a receiving system may take action ranging from dropping the message entirely, to flagging it as suspicious but still delivering it to the user’s inbox. A third security control, DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) takes SPF and DKIM outputs and generates a series of instructions for receiving mailbox providers about what to do with questionable mail. Any serious provider will support these mechanisms and provide visibility into their actual performance on your email.

Amazon WorkMail’s Interface with SES

Once you’ve got clean email and reputable senders or recipients, you have to be able to figure out where to deliver the message itself. SES Inbound has a specific internal action when used with WorkMail, where the message is routed to WorkMail’s own infrastructure for matching against a known user’s inbox and performing the indexing and storage operations necessary to make it show up in your desktop, web, or mobile mail client. There are a number of options which may take place while that message is in transit, however, and the SES framework supports those with its flexible routing options. For example, a very popular choice is for customers to trigger a transport rule powered by AWS Lambda for inbound and/or outbound messages. Some of these are simple – they append a standard banner to the message if it is inbound from an external source, for example – but there is really no limit to what programmatic steps can be taken. You could submit message content to a large language model (LLM) for training or inspection. You could examine its use of language with AWS Bedrock to train a foundational model in generative AI about how to write emails itself. WorkMail and SES support and encourage these kind of big ideas for working with your message content.

Managing Spikes and Growth

Another critical advantage SES provides is the ability to absorb huge spikes in inbound traffic, and to sustain very large permitted volumes of outbound traffic as well. Email’s underlying standards and protocols offer administrators some degree of control over delays in transit, by implementing retry intervals to buffer messages if they can’t be delivered immediately. The classic on-premise enterprise use case, however, still runs the risk of overwhelming the capacity of the (single) mail server, either due to a malicious action by a sender or a huge increase in usage over a very short period of time. SES absorbs those spikes automatically and has orders of magnitude more capacity than any typical on-premise deployment, meaning that your mail enjoys multiple tiers of buffering only when required, and with no introduced latency if buffering is unnecessary.

Putting it All Together

So how does it all work together? The inbound use case is our main focus. When a message arrives via SMTP, SES first interrogates a back-end directory to confirm that the message is destined for an SES customer. If so, it looks up how the customer’s domain is configured, or if it is a WorkMail customer domain. From there the message passes through the SES message scanner, where its content is evaluated for spam or malware, and a scoring indicator is added to the message headers. That score may result in the message being dropped altogether, or it may result in the message ultimately being delivered to a Junk Mail folder in a WorkMail mailbox. Once scored, the message is either stored in the customer’s S3 storage, or delivered to WorkMail for further processing, such as being put in a specific folder, or redirected to another recipient. Once it’s stored somewhere, the customer can interact with it either using SES APIs, or via standard mail clients interacting with a WorkMail mailbox. In practice a mailbox is a structured object format also within S3, but without raw S3 access because the storage is managed as a system resource within WorkMail instead of being owned by an end customer.

The Customer Experience

When a WorkMail customer wants to send a message, they compose it in a mail client and then click ‘Send’ to send it via SMTP. In the outbound case WorkMail relays the message to SES internet-facing mail relays, which in turn look up the recipient domain information for details on how to route it. SES mail relays also perform the necessary security and authentication checks to ensure that the message is sent by a valid user (either SES native or WorkMail) and that the content is cryptographically signed so a receiving system can verify it hasn’t been manipulated in transit, using the DKIM mechanism described previously. When those steps are complete, the message is handed off to the next mail relay on the internet, and SES has no further role in its future unless a receiving system flags it as abusive. In that case the feedback is delivered to SES automatically and a series of containment actions are considered based on the nature and history of abuse reports. Thus the feedback loop to IP reputation is maintained even in the case of a rogue actor sending bad mail.

Robust Tooling Makes Email Look Easy

The bottom line is that SES enables these flows, and a customer wanting to build a comprehensive mail system could do so themselves if they didn’t want to use WorkMail or another existing email service provider. We’ve seen a tremendous range of creative solution-building from customers when they combine SES inbound and outbound mail, a subset of WorkMail mailboxes and their own rules and organization policies, the use of AWS Lambdas, and inline email security gateways. The flexibility to build whatever you need, without being tied to a single product vendor, is what makes SES so popular with its customers, and ensures that WorkMail – as a turnkey mail service – works so reliably for those customers who just need their mail and calendar to work.

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.

How to investigate what happened to the email that was sent via SES but was never received in recipient inbox

2023-06-27 singhzwz

Post Syndicated from singhzwz original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/how-to-investigate-what-happened-to-the-email-that-was-sent-via-ses-but-was-never-received-in-recipient-inbox/

How to investigate what happened to the email that was sent via SES but was never received in recipient inbox

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is an email platform that provides an easy, cost-effective way for you to send and receive email using your own email addresses and domains.

You can use SES for two major use cases. The first use case is marketing emails, which can include things such as special offers, newsletters, and product updates. The second use case is transactional emails, which can include things such as order confirmation, One Time Password (OTP), and registration confirmation.

One common issue we hear from our customers is that emails are not delivered to the recipient’s inbox. There are three areas in the flow where this could happen:

Emails were not sent successfully by your email application
Emails get dropped within SES after being received from your email application
Emails are dropped after leaving SES

In this blog post, we will explore each of these three scenarios.

Prerequisites:

To investigate each scenario, you need the following:

Understand How email sending works in Amazon SES
Enable verbose logging on your email application
Amazon SES – Set up notifications for bounces and complaints

Scenario 1: Emails were not sent successfully by your email application

The first step in the process is for your application to contact SES to pass it the message. This is one place where problems could occur.
Remember that for each message it successfully enqueues, SES returns a message ID that you can log on your side. An example message ID looks like 01000174f87e0fb4-81b97243-56b0-4cd1-90c7-d6987a00fdc1-000000.

Here is an example of Sendmail logs for successfully relaying the email to SES.

Jun 22 15:29:42 ip-172-12-12-12.ec2.internal sendmail[323257]: 35ABCDEF123123: to=<[email protected]>, delay=00:00:01, xdelay=00:00:01, mailer=relay, pri=30123, relay=email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com. [3.95.123.123], dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent (Ok 01000174f87e0fb4-81b97243-56b0-4cd1-90c7-d6987a00fdc1-000000)

To verify that your requests are successful, you can look for the message IDs. If SES never accepted your message, you can be sure it won’t be delivered! If you are able to log a message ID, it means that your email safely arrived at SES.

Actions to troubleshoot client side issue:

1. In order to test that the problem lies between your application and SES, you can try to send a test email from the SES console to an email address and domain where you are experiencing the issue. If that test email arrives on time, it’s a pretty good indicator that the error is occurring before your email even reaches SES.
2. Examine the logs at application side to confirm if the application has successfully passed the email to SES. A success response looks like the following example:

250 Ok 0000012345678e09-123a4cdc-b56c-78dd-b90e-d123be456789-000000

Some common errors include the following:

* Email address is not verified. The following identities failed the check in region region: identity1, identity2, identity3
* Account is paused
* Daily message quota exceeded
* Maximum sending rate exceeded
* Maximum SigV2 SMTP sending rate exceeded

Another common type of error is a connection timeout error. Here is an example of a Java exception that shows a connection timeout error to an SES endpoint:

Caused: com.sun.mail.util.MailConnectException: Couldn't connect to host, port: email-smtp.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com , 465; timeout 60000; nested exception is: java.net .ConnectException: Connection timed out (Connection timed out) at com.sun.mail.smtp.SMTPTransport.openServer(SMTPTransport.java:2209 ) at com.sun.mail.smtp.SMTPTransport.protocolConnect(SMTPTransport.java:740 )

The way that you observe this error message depends on the way that you call SES.

If you call the SES API directly, the action to interact with SES will return an error like MessageRejected or one of the errors specified in the Common Errors topic of the Amazon Simple Email Service API Reference.

If you call SES through its SMTP interface, the way that you experience the error depends on the application. Some applications might display a specific error message, and others might not. For a list of SMTP response codes that SES returns, see SMTP response codes returned by Amazon SES.

Scenario 2: Emails get dropped within SES after being received from your email application

Once SES accepts the message and provides a message ID, the next step is to process it and hand it over to the recipient ISP or the recipient mailbox provider. However, in the following scenarios SES can drop the email after receiving it:

Rendering Failure: This can happen when you use an email template to send email. Upon accepting the email from your email application, SES validates that the template data you send includes the required variables in the template. If the template data contains non-compliant variables or is missing variables, SES is unable to construct the email and drops the email. This is called a Rendering Failure.
Suppression list: If a recipient is on an SES suppression list, SES will drop the email to protect the sender reputation. There are two types of suppression lists: Account-level suppression list and global suppression list. To learn more about the two types of suppression lists, please refer to Managing lists and subscriptions in Amazon Simple Email Service.
Reject Event: SES accepted the email, but determined that it contained a virus and didn’t attempt to deliver it to the recipient’s mail server. SES drops the email and generates a Reject event.

Actions to troubleshoot such issues:

To identify the root cause of the three preceding scenarios, you need to set up Amazon SES event publishing. Please refer to the prerequisite section to set this up.

Scenario 1: Rendering Failure

Here is an example event publishing record for Rendering Failure

{
"eventType":"Rendering Failure",
"mail":{
"timestamp":"2018-01-22T18:43:06.197Z",
"source":"[email protected]",
"sourceArn":"arn:aws:ses:us-east-1:123456789012:identity/[email protected]",
"sendingAccountId":"123456789012",
"messageId":"EXAMPLE7c191be45-e9aedb9a-02f9-4d12-a87d-dd0099a07f8a-000000",
"destination":[
"[email protected]"
],
"headersTruncated":false,
"tags":{
"ses:configuration-set":[
"ConfigSet"
]
}
},
"failure":{
"errorMessage":"Attribute 'attributeName' is not present in the rendering data.",
"templateName":"MyTemplate"
}
}

In this example, the error message tells you that there is a missing variable attributeName in the template data. To learn more about troubleshooting rendering failure, please refer to Why are emails failing to deliver when I send Amazon SES emails using the SendTemplatedEmail operation?

Scenario 2: Suppression list

SES drops the email if the recipient is on an account-level suppression list or a global suppression list. The following is an example error message for recipient being on a global suppression list:

"diagnosticCode": "Amazon SES has suppressed sending to this address because it has a recent history of bouncing as an invalid address. For more information about how to remove an address from the suppression list, see the Amazon SES Developer Guide: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/remove-from-suppressionlist.html"

The example demonstrates that the email get bounced because the recipient is on the global suppression list. We recommend enabling SES account-level suppression list because the account-level suppression list supersedes the global suppression list.

If the recipient is on your account-level suppression list, you can remove individual email addresses from your Amazon SES account-level suppression list. The following is an example error message for recipient being on a account-level suppression list:

"diagnosticCode": "Amazon SES did not send the message to this address because it is on the suppression list for your account. For more information about removing addresses from the suppression list, see the Amazon SES Developer Guide at https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/sending-email-suppression-list.html"

Note: The suppression list feature is in place to avoid emails being sent to recipients who are known to produce bounce or complaint for your emails in past. Enabling this feature protects your reputation as a sender. Only remove the recipient when you are assured that recipients in concern will no longer produce bounce or complaint for your emails.

Scenario 3: Reject Event

SES rejects the email when it scans the email and determines that it contains a virus. The following is an example of a Reject event publishing record.

{
"eventType": "Reject",
"mail": {
"timestamp": "2016-10-14T17:38:15.211Z",
"source": "[email protected]",
"sourceArn": "arn:aws:ses:us-east-1:123456789012:identity/[email protected]",
"sendingAccountId": "123456789012",
"messageId": "EXAMPLE7c191be45-e9aedb9a-02f9-4d12-a87d-dd0099a07f8a-000000",
"destination": [
"[email protected]"
],
"headersTruncated": false,
"headers": [{
"name": "From",
"value": "[email protected]"
},
{
"name": "To",
"value": "[email protected]"
},
{
"name": "Subject",
"value": "Message sent from Amazon SES"
},
{
"name": "MIME-Version",
"value": "1.0"
},
{
"name": "Content-Type",
"value": "multipart/mixed; boundary=\"qMm9M+Fa2AknHoGS\""
},
{
"name": "X-SES-MESSAGE-TAGS",
"value": "myCustomTag1=myCustomTagValue1, myCustomTag2=myCustomTagValue2"
}
],
"commonHeaders": {
"from": [
"[email protected]"
],
"to": [
"[email protected]"
],
"messageId": "EXAMPLE7c191be45-e9aedb9a-02f9-4d12-a87d-dd0099a07f8a-000000",
"subject": "Message sent from Amazon SES"
},
"tags": {
" ses:configuration-set": [
"ConfigSet"
],
"ses:source-ip": [
"192.0.2.0"
],
"ses:from-domain": [
"example.com"
],
"ses:caller-identity": [
"ses_user"
],
"myCustomTag1": [
"myCustomTagValue1"
],
"myCustomTag2": [
"myCustomTagValue2"
]
}
},
"reject": {
"reason": "Bad content"
}
}

To fix this issue, please examine the email and make sure there is no virus in the email. You can test your email content by sending a test email to Amazon SES mailbox simulator.

Scenario 3: Emails are dropped after leaving SES
We sometimes encounter this when we successfully deliver the email to a recipient ISP, only to have the recipient ISP hold back the email and not deliver to the recipient’s inbox. This can happen for a variety of reasons, for example the recipient ISP’s anti-spam filters, or because the sender has not yet built sufficient reputation due to it being a new domain or IP and the recipient does not yet trust the sender.

Actions to troubleshoot such issues:

To identify the root cause of the issue, you need to set up Amazon SNS notification. Please refer to the prerequisite section to set this up.

When the recipient ISP accepts the email, it returns a 250 ok status code to SES. SES includes the detailed status code and response message from the recipient ISP in the SNS notification.The following is an example SNS notification for a success delivery event.

{
"notificationType":"Delivery",
"mail":{
"timestamp":"2016-01-27T14:59:38.237Z",
"messageId":"0000014644fe5ef6-9a483358-9170-4cb4-a269-f5dcdf415321-000000",
"source":"[email protected]",
"sourceArn": "arn:aws:ses:us-east-1:888888888888:identity/example.com",
"sourceIp": "127.0.3.0",
"sendingAccountId":"123456789012",
"callerIdentity": "IAM_user_or_role_name",
"destination":[
"[email protected]"
],
"headersTruncated":false,
"headers":[
{
"name":"From",
"value":"\"John Doe\" <[email protected]>"
},
{
"name":"To",
"value":"\"Jane Doe\" <[email protected]>"
},
{
"name":"Message-ID",
"value":"custom-message-ID"
},
{
"name":"Subject",
"value":"Hello"
},
{
"name":"Content-Type",
"value":"text/plain; charset=\"UTF-8\""
},
{
"name":"Content-Transfer-Encoding",
"value":"base64"
},
{
"name":"Date",
"value":"Wed, 27 Jan 2016 14:58:45 +0000"
}
],
"commonHeaders":{
"from":[
"John Doe <[email protected]>"
],
"date":"Wed, 27 Jan 2016 14:58:45 +0000",
"to":[
"Jane Doe <[email protected]>"
],
"messageId":"custom-message-ID",
"subject":"Hello"
}
},
"delivery":{
"timestamp":"2016-01-27T14:59:38.237Z",
"recipients":["[email protected]"],
"processingTimeMillis":546,
"reportingMTA":"a8-70.smtp-out.amazonses.com",
"smtpResponse":"250 ok: Message 64111812 accepted",
"remoteMtaIp":"127.0.2.0"
}
}

In this example, the SMTP response is "250 ok:Message 64111812 accepted", this confirms the recipient ISP accepted the email. At this point, the email is with the recipient ISP and SES no longer has control over the email.

ISPs use different mechanisms and algorithms to filter emails to place them in either the recipient’s inbox folder or spam folder. In such case, you will need to reach out to the recipient ISP to understand why they accepted the email but did not deliver it to the recipient inbox. Since their servers decide the placement of email, they can give a clear explanation of the cause of the issue and steps to remediate the issue.

The recipient ISP may reject the email. When this happens, the recipient ISP returns a 4xx or 5xx error code to SES. This is also called a bounce event.

There are two kinds of bounce events: Soft bounce and hard bounce. Soft bounce refers to a temporary email delivery failure, this kind of error usually can be retried. Hard bounce refers to a permanent delivery failure, and it cannot be retried. The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) Enhanced Status Codes Registry lists the possible error codes and reasons for email delivery failure. Generally speaking, 4xx error codes are soft bounces, 5xx error codes are hard bounces.

When the recipient ISP bounces the email, SES includes the detailed status code and response message from the recipient ISP in the SNS notification.

The following is an example SNS notification for a bounce event.

{
"notificationType":"Bounce",
"bounce":{
"bounceType":"Permanent",
"reportingMTA":"dns; email.example.com",
"bouncedRecipients":[
{
"emailAddress":"[email protected]",
"status":"5.1.1",
"action":"failed",
"diagnosticCode":"smtp; 550 5.1.1 <[email protected]> User not found"
}
],
"bounceSubType":"General",
"timestamp":"2016-01-27T14:59:38.237Z",
"feedbackId":"00000138111222aa-33322211-cccc-cccc-cccc-ddddaaaa068a-000000",
"remoteMtaIp":"127.0.2.0"
},
"mail":{
"timestamp":"2016-01-27T14:59:38.237Z",
"source":"[email protected]",
"sourceArn": "arn:aws:ses:us-east-1:888888888888:identity/example.com",
"sourceIp": "127.0.3.0",
"sendingAccountId":"123456789012",
"callerIdentity": "IAM_user_or_role_name",
"messageId":"00000138111222aa-33322211-cccc-cccc-cccc-ddddaaaa0680-000000",
"destination":[
"[email protected]",
"[email protected]",
"[email protected]"],
"headersTruncated":false,
"headers":[
{
"name":"From",
"value":"\"John Doe\" <[email protected]>"
},
{
"name":"To",
"value":"\"Jane Doe\" <[email protected]>, \"Mary Doe\" <[email protected]>, \"Richard Doe\" <[email protected]>"
},
{
"name":"Message-ID",
"value":"custom-message-ID"
},
{
"name":"Subject",
"value":"Hello"
},
{
"name":"Content-Type",
"value":"text/plain; charset=\"UTF-8\""
},
{
"name":"Content-Transfer-Encoding",
"value":"base64"
},
{
"name":"Date",
"value":"Wed, 27 Jan 2016 14:05:45 +0000"
}
],
"commonHeaders":{
"from":[
"John Doe <[email protected]>"
],
"date":"Wed, 27 Jan 2016 14:05:45 +0000",
"to":[
"Jane Doe <[email protected]>, Mary Doe <[email protected]>, Richard Doe <[email protected]>"
],
"messageId":"custom-message-ID",
"subject":"Hello"
}
}
}

In the preceding example, the recipient ISP permanently bounced the email. This is concluded from the "bounceType":"Permanent" field. Additionally, the recipient ISP provides the reason they bounced the email in the “diagnosticCode” field, and the reason is "smtp; 550 5.1.1 <[email protected]> User not found". In this case, [email protected] isn’t a valid inbox, the error can’t be resolved by retrying the request. The sender should check the spelling of the email address and confirm with the recipient that this address has a valid inbox before retry sending to this address again. You can also contact the recipient ISP to understand the reasons of the error and steps to remediate the issue when the information provided by the "diagnosticCode" isn’t sufficient or clear.

Another event that can happen is “delivery delay”. Such event happen when the email couldn’t be delivered to the recipient’s mail server because a temporary issue occurred. Delivery delays can occur, for example, when the recipient’s inbox is full, or when the receiving email server experiences a transient issue. These are usually soft bounces in which case SES is programmed to retry such deliveries several times over the next 10 hours. If you have enabled SES event publishing for this event you can review the “delivery delay” object section of SES event record to understand the cause of delay and take corrective actions accordingly. As an example, if you reach out to the recipient ISP and the recipient ISP informs you about maintenance on their side that is causing the issue then you can refrain sending to that ISP till the maintenance completes.

Conclusion:
Now that you know the 3 areas in the email sending flow where errors can occur you can begin to troubleshoot whether your problems are at your email application side, within SES, or at the recipient ISP. Make sure that you have proper logging and that you are receiving the events that provide you the detail you need to determine where your errors are occurring. Errors happening prior to the email being sent out from SES are usually solvable, while challenges in deliverability once an email has been sent from SES require more due diligence and experimentation in your content to determine why your emails are being delivered to spam, or not at all.

Feel free to post any comments or questions for us in the AWS Forum.

References:
[1]https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/send-email-concepts-process.html
[2]https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/monitor-sending-activity.html
[3]https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/monitor-using-event-publishing.html#event-publishing-how-works