Tag Archives: messaging

Serverless IoT email capture, attachment processing, and distribution

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:

  1. SMTP client transmits email content to an email address in a (sub) domain with MX record set to Amazon SES service’s regional endpoint.
  2. Amazon SES SMTP interface receives an email and forwards it to SES Receipt Rule(s) for processing.
  3. A matching Amazon SES Receipt Rule saves incoming email into an Amazon S3 Bucket.
  4. Amazon S3 Bucket emits an S3 ObjectCreated Event, and places the event onto the Amazon Simple Queue Services (SQS) queue.
  5. The AWS Lambda service polls the inbound messages’ SQS queue and feeds events to the Lambda function.
  6. 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).
  7. The Lambda function saves extracted attachments, if any, into an attachments bucket.
  8. Malformed email notifications are posted to a fallback Amazon SNS Topic.
  9. The Lambda function invokes Amazon SES API to send the processed email to all intended recipient addresses.
  10. 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.
  11. SES delivers an email to each recipients’ mail server.
  12. Intended recipients download emails from their corporate mail servers and retrieve attachments from the S3 pre-signed URL(s) embedded in the email body.
  13. 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:

  1. 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.
  2. Test your connection to ensure you can send emails.
  3. 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.

  1. Verify the domain that you want to use for receiving emails.
  2. 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.
  3. 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

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. Review access to your code repository regularly to ensure there are no unauthorized changes to your code base.
  4. 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 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 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 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 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 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

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.

Log - unsuccessful Login Attempt

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

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

Miguel

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

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

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?

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
        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.
            1. 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

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

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

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:

  1. 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”
  2. 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.
  3. 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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:

  1. AWS Account (setup) with enough permission to interact with the SES service via the CLI
  2. Upgrade to the latest version of the AWS CLI (aws-cli/2.15.27 or greater)
  3. SES enabled, configured and properly sending emails
  4. 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.
  5. Your preferred IDE with AWS credentials and necessary permissions (you can also use AWS CloudShell)

Open the AWS CLI (or AWS CloudShell) and:

  1. Create a test directory called v1-v2-test.
  2. 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):

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

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 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 Lobanovskis

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

Message delivery status tracking with Amazon Pinpoint

Post Syndicated from Brijesh Pati original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/message-delivery-status-tracking-with-amazon-pinpoint/

In the vast landscape of digital communication, reaching your audience effectively is key to building successful customer relationships. Amazon Pinpoint – Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) flexible, user-focused messaging and targeting solution goes beyond mere messaging; it allows businesses to engage customers through email, SMS, push notifications, and more.

What sets Amazon Pinpoint apart is its scalability and deliverability. Amazon Pinpoint supports a multitude of business use cases, from promotional campaigns and transactional messages to customer engagement journeys. It provides insights and analytics that help tailor and measure the effectiveness of communication strategies.

For businesses, the power of this platform extends into areas such as marketing automation, customer retention campaigns, and transactional messaging for updates like order confirmations and shipping alerts. The versatility of Amazon Pinpoint can be a significant asset in crafting personalized user experiences at scale.

Use Case & Solution overview – Tracking SMS & Email Delivery Status

In a business setting, understanding whether a time-sensitive email or SMS was received can greatly impact customer experience as well as operational efficiency. For instance, consider an e-commerce platform sending out shipping notifications. By quickly verifying that the message was delivered, businesses can preemptively address any potential issues, ensuring customer satisfaction.

Amazon Pinpoint tracks email and SMS delivery and engagement events, which can be streamed using Amazon Kinesis Firehose for storage or further processing. However, third party applications don’t have a direct API to query and obtain the latest status of a message.

To address the above challenge, this blog presents a solution that leverages AWS services for data streaming, storage, and retrieval of Amazon Pinpoint events using a simple API call. At the core of the solution is Amazon Pinpoint event stream capability, which utilizes Amazon Kinesis services for data streaming.

The architecture for message delivery status tracking with Amazon Pinpoint is comprised of several AWS services that work in concert. To streamline the deployment of these components, they have been encapsulated into an AWS CloudFormation template. This template allows for automated provisioning and configuration of the necessary AWS resources, ensuring a repeatable and error-free deployment.

The key components of the solution are as follows:

  1. Event Generation: An event is generated within Amazon Pinpoint when a user interacts with an application, or when a message is sent from a campaign, journey, or as a transactional communication. The event name and metadata depends on the channel SMS or Email.
  2. Amazon Pinpoint Event Data Streaming: The generated event data is streamed to Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. Kinesis Data Firehose is configured to collect the event information in near real-time, enabling the subsequent processing and analysis of the data.
  3. Pinpoint Event Data Processing: Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is configured to invoke a specified AWS Lambda function to transform the incoming source data. This transformation step is set up during the creation of the Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream, ensuring that the data is in the correct format before it is stored, enhancing its utility for immediate and downstream analysis. The Lambda function acts as a transformation mechanism for event data ingested through Kinesis Data Firehose. The function decodes the base64-encoded event data, deserializes the JSON payload, and processes the data depending on the event type (email or SMS)- it parses the raw data, extracting relevant attributes before ingesting it into Amazon DynamoDB. The function handles different event types, specifically email and SMS events, discerning their unique attributes and ensuring they are formatted correctly for DynamoDB’s schema.
  4. Data Ingestion into Dynamo DB: Once processed, the data is stored in Amazon DynamoDB. DynamoDB provides a fast and flexible NoSQL database service, which facilitates the efficient storage and retrieval of event data for analysis.
  5. Data Storage: Amazon DynamoDB stores the event data after it’s been processed by AWS Lambda. Amazon DynamoDB is a highly scalable NoSQL database that enables fast queries, which is essential for retrieving the status of messages quickly and efficiently, thereby facilitating timely decision-making based on customer interactions.
  6. Customer application/interface: Users or integrated systems engage with the messaging status through either a frontend customer application or directly via an API. This interface or API acts as the conduit through which message delivery statuses are queried, monitored, and managed, providing a versatile gateway for both user interaction and programmatic access.
  7. API Management: The customer application communicates with the backend systems through Amazon API Gateway. This service acts as a fully managed gateway, handling all the API calls, data transformation, and transfer between the frontend application and backend services.
  8. Event Status Retrieval API: When the API Gateway receives a delivery status request, it invokes another AWS Lambda function that is responsible for querying the DynamoDB table. It retrieves the latest status of the message delivery, which is then presented to the user via the API.

DynamoDB Table Design for Message Tracking:

The tables below outline the DynamoDB schema designed for the efficient storage and retrieval of message statuses, detailing distinct event statuses and attributes for each message type such as email and SMS:

Attributes for Email Events:
Attribute Data type Description
message_id String The unique message ID generated by Amazon Pinpoint.
event_type String The value would be ’email’.
aws_account_id String The AWS account ID used to send the email.
from_address String The sending identity used to send the email.
destination String The recipient’s email address.
client String The client ID if applicable
campaign_id String The campaign ID if part of a campaign
journey_id String The journey ID if part of a journey
send Timestamp The timestamp when Amazon Pinpoint accepted the message and attempted to deliver it to the recipient
delivered Timestamp The timestamp when the email was delivered, or ‘NA’ if not delivered.
rejected Timestamp The timestamp when the email was rejected (Amazon Pinpoint determined that the message contained malware and didn’t attempt to send it.)
hardbounce Timestamp The timestamp when a hard bounce occurred (A permanent issue prevented Amazon Pinpoint from delivering the message. Amazon Pinpoint won’t attempt to deliver the message again)
softbounce Timestamp The timestamp when a soft bounce occurred (A temporary issue prevented Amazon Pinpoint from delivering the message. Amazon Pinpoint will attempt to deliver the message again for a certain amount of time. If the message still can’t be delivered, no more retries will be attempted. The final state of the email will then be SOFTBOUNCE.)
complaint Timestamp The timestamp when a complaint was received (The recipient received the message, and then reported the message to their email provider as spam (for example, by using the “Report Spam” feature of their email client).
open Timestamp The timestamp when the email was opened (The recipient received the message and opened it.)
click Timestamp The timestamp when a link in the email was clicked. (The recipient received the message and clicked a link in it)
unsubscribe Timestamp The timestamp when a link in the email was unsubscribed (The recipient received the message and clicked an unsubscribe link in it.)
rendering_failure Timestamp The timestamp when a link in the email was clicked (The email was not sent due to a rendering failure. This can occur when template data is missing or when there is a mismatch between template parameters and data.)

Attributes for SMS Events:
Attribute Data type Description
message_id String The unique message ID generated by Amazon Pinpoint.
event_type String The value would be ‘sms’.
aws_account_id String The AWS account ID used to send the email.
origination_phone_number String The phone number from which the SMS was sent.
destination_phone_number String The phone number to which the SMS was sent.
record_status String Additional information about the status of the message. Possible values include:
– SUCCESSFUL/DELIVERED – Successfully delivered.
– PENDING – Not yet delivered.
– INVALID – Invalid destination phone number.
– UNREACHABLE – Recipient’s device unreachable.
– UNKNOWN – Error preventing delivery.
– BLOCKED – Device blocking SMS.
– CARRIER_UNREACHABLE – Carrier issue preventing delivery.
– SPAM – Message identified as spam.
– INVALID_MESSAGE – Invalid SMS message body.
– CARRIER_BLOCKED – Carrier blocked message.
– TTL_EXPIRED – Message not delivered in time.
– MAX_PRICE_EXCEEDED – Exceeded SMS spending quota.
– OPTED_OUT – Recipient opted out.
– NO_QUOTA_LEFT_ON_ACCOUNT – Insufficient spending quota.
– NO_ORIGINATION_IDENTITY_AVAILABLE_TO_SEND – No suitable origination identity.
– DESTINATION_COUNTRY_NOT_SUPPORTED – Destination country blocked.
– ACCOUNT_IN_SANDBOX – Account in sandbox mode.
– RATE_EXCEEDED – Message sending rate exceeded.
– INVALID_ORIGINATION_IDENTITY – Invalid origination identity.
– ORIGINATION_IDENTITY_DOES_NOT_EXIST – Non-existent origination identity.
– INVALID_DLT_PARAMETERS – Invalid DLT parameters.
– INVALID_PARAMETERS – Invalid parameters.
– ACCESS_DENIED – Account blocked from sending messages.
– INVALID_KEYWORD – Invalid keyword.
– INVALID_SENDER_ID – Invalid Sender ID.
– INVALID_POOL_ID – Invalid Pool ID.
– SENDER_ID_NOT_SUPPORTED_FOR_DESTINATION – Sender ID not supported.
– INVALID_PHONE_NUMBER – Invalid origination phone number.
iso_country_code String The ISO country code associated with the destination phone number.
message_type String The type of SMS message sent.
campaign_id String The campaign ID if part of a campaign, otherwise N/A.
journey_id String The journey ID if part of a journey, otherwise N/A.
success Timestamp The timestamp when the SMS was successfully accepted by the carrier/delivered to the recipient, or ‘NA’ if not applicable.
buffered Timestamp The timestamp when the SMS is still in the process of being delivered to the recipient, or ‘NA’ if not applicable.
failure Timestamp The timestamp when the SMS delivery failed, or ‘NA’ if not applicable.
complaint Timestamp The timestamp when a complaint was received (The recipient received the message, and then reported the message to their email provider as spam (for example, by using the “Report Spam” feature of their email client).
optout Timestamp The timestamp when the customer received the message and replied by sending the opt-out keyword (usually “STOP”), or ‘NA’ if not applicable.
price_in_millicents_usd Number The amount that was charged to send the message.

Prerequisites

  • AWS Account Access (setup) with admin-level permission.
  • AWS CLI version 2 with named profile setup. If a locally configured IDE is not convenient, you can use the AWS CLI from the AWS CloudShell in your browser.
  • A Pinpoint project that has never been configured with an event stream (PinpointEventStream).“
  • The Pinpoint ID from the project you want to monitor. This ID can be found in the AWS Pinpoint console on the project’s main page (it will look something like “79788ecad55555513b71752a4e3ea1111”). Copy this ID to a text file, as you will need it shortly.
    • Note, you must use the ID from a Pinpoint project that has never been configured with the PinpointEventStream option.

Solution Deployment & Testing

Deploying this solution is a straightforward process, thanks to the AWS CloudFormation template we’ve created. This template automates the creation and configuration of the necessary AWS resources into an AWS stack. The CloudFormation template ensures that the components such as Kinesis Data Firehose, AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon API Gateway are set up consistently and correctly.

Deployment Steps:

  • Download the CloudFormation Template from this GitHub sample repository. The CloudFormation template is authored in JSON and named PinpointAPIBlog.yaml.
  • Access the CloudFormation Console: Sign into the AWS Management Console and open the AWS CloudFormation console.
  • Create a New Stack:
    • Choose Create Stack and select With new resources (standard) to start the stack creation process.
    • Under Prerequisite – Prepare template, select Template is ready.
    • Under ‘Specify template’, choose Upload a template file, and then upload the CloudFormation template file you downloaded in Step 1.
  • Configure the Stack:
    • Provide a stack name, such as “pinpoint-yourprojectname-monitoring” and paste the Pinpoint project (application) ID. Press Next.
    • Review the stack settings, and make any necessary changes based on your specific requirements. Next.
  • Initiate the Stack Creation: Once you’ve configured all options, acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation might create IAM resources with custom names, and then choose Create stack.
    • AWS CloudFormation will now provision and configure the resources as defined in the template This will take about 20 minutes to fully deploy. You can view the status in the AWS CloudFormation console.

Testing the Solution:

After deployment is complete you can test (and use) the solution.

  • Send Test Messages: Utilize the Amazon Pinpoint console to send test email and SMS messages. Documentation for this can be found at:
  • Verify Lambda Execution:
    • Navigate to the AWS CloudWatch console.
    • Locate and review the logs for the Lambda functions specified in the solution (`aws/lambda/{functionName}`) to confirm that the Kinesis Data Firehose records are being processed successfully. In the log events you should see messages including INIT_START, Raw Kinesis Data Firehouse Record, etc.
  • Check Amazon DynamoDB Data:
    • Navigate to Amazon DynamoDB in the AWS Console.
    • Select the table created by the CloudFormation template and choose ‘Explore Table Items‘.
    • Confirm the presence of the event data by checking if the message IDs appear in the table.
    • The table should have one or more message_id entries from the test message(s) you sent above.
    • Click on a message_id to review the data, and copy the message_id to a text editor on your computer. It will look like “0201123456gs3nroo-clv5s8pf-8cq2-he0a-ji96-59nr4tgva0g0-343434”
  • API Gateway Testing:
    • In the API Gateway console, find the MessageIdAPI.
    • Navigate to Stages and copy the Invoke URL provided.

    • Open the text editor on your computer and paste the APIGateway invoke URL.
    • Create a curl command with you API Gateway + ?message_id=message_id. It should look like this: “https://txxxxxx0.execute-api.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/call?message_id=020100000xx3xxoo-clvxxxxf-8cq2-he0a-ji96-59nr4tgva0g0-000000”
    • Copy the full curl command in your browser and enter.
    • The results should look like this (MacOS, Chrome):

By following these deployment and testing steps, you’ll have a functioning solution for tracking Pinpoint message delivery status using Amazon Pinpoint, Kinesis Fire Hose, DynamoDB and CloudWatch.

Clean Up

To help prevent unwanted charges to your AWS account, you can delete the AWS resources that you used for this walkthrough.

To delete the stack follow these following instructions:

Open the AWS CloudFormation console.

  • In the AWS CloudFormation console dashboard, select the stack you created (pinpoint-yourprojectname-monitoring).
  • On the Actions menu, choose Delete Stack.
  • When you are prompted to confirm, choose Yes, Delete.
  • Wait for DELETE_COMPLETE to appear in the Status column for the stack.

Next steps

The solution on this blog provides you an API endpoint to query messages’ status. The next step is to store and analyze the raw data based on your business’s requirements. The Amazon Kinesis Firehose used in this blog can stream the Pinpoint events to an AWS database or object storage like Amazon S3. Once the data is stored, you can catalogue them using AWS Glue, query them via SQL using Amazon Athena and create custom dashboards using Amazon QuickSight, which is a cloud-native, serverless, business intelligence (BI) with native machine learning (ML) integrations.

Conclusion

The integration of AWS services such as Kinesis, Lambda, DynamoDB, and API Gateway with Amazon Pinpoint transforms your ability to connect with customers through precise event data retrieval and analysis. This solution provides a stream of real-time data, versatile storage options, and a secure method for accessing detailed information, all of which are critical for optimizing your communication strategies.

By leveraging these insights, you can fine-tune your email and SMS campaigns for maximum impact, ensuring every message counts in the broader narrative of customer engagement and satisfaction. Harness the power of AWS and Amazon Pinpoint to not just reach out but truly connect with your audience, elevating your customer relationships to new heights.

Considerations/Troubleshooting

When implementing a solution involving AWS Lambda, Kinesis Data Streams, Kinesis Data Firehose, and DynamoDB, several key considerations should be considered:

  • Scalability and Performance: Assess the scalability needs of your system. Lambda functions scale automatically, but it’s important to configure concurrency settings and memory allocation based on expected load. Similarly, for Kinesis Streams and Firehose, consider the volume of data and the throughput rate. For DynamoDB, ensure that the table’s read and write capacity settings align with your data processing requirements.
  • Error Handling and Retries: Implement robust error handling within the Lambda functions to manage processing failures. Kinesis Data Streams and Firehose have different retry behaviors and mechanisms. Understand and configure these settings to handle failed data processing attempts effectively. In DynamoDB, consider the use of conditional writes to handle potential data inconsistencies.
  • Security and IAM Permissions: Secure your AWS resources by adhering to the principle of least privilege. Define IAM roles and policies that grant the Lambda function only the necessary permissions to interact with Kinesis and DynamoDB. Ensure that data in transit and at rest is encrypted as required, using AWS KMS or other encryption mechanisms.
  • Monitoring and Logging: Utilize AWS CloudWatch for monitoring and logging the performance and execution of Lambda functions, as well as Kinesis and DynamoDB operations. Set up alerts for any anomalies or thresholds that indicate issues in data processing or performance bottlenecks.

About the Authors

Brijesh Pati

Brijesh Pati

Brijesh Pati is an Enterprise Solutions Architect at AWS. His primary focus is helping enterprise customers adopt cloud technologies for their workloads. He has a background in application development and enterprise architecture and has worked with customers from various industries such as sports, finance, energy and professional services. His interests include serverless architectures and AI/ML.

Pavlos Ioannou Katidis

Pavlos Ioannou Katidis

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

Anshika Singh

Anshika Singh

Anshika Singh is an Associate Solutions Architect at AWS specializing in building for GenAI applications. She helps enable customers to use the cloud through the use of code samples and starter projects.

Announcing throughput increase and dead letter queue redrive support for Amazon SQS FIFO queues

Post Syndicated from Danilo Poccia original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/announcing-throughput-increase-and-dead-letter-queue-redrive-support-for-amazon-sqs-fifo-queues/

With Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), you can send, store, and receive messages between software components at any volume. Today, Amazon SQS has introduced two new capabilities for first-in, first-out (FIFO) queues:

  • Maximum throughput has been increased up to 70,000 transactions per second (TPS) per API action in selected AWS Regions, supporting sending or receiving up to 700,000 messages per second with batching.
  • Dead letter queue (DLQ) redrive support to handle messages that are not consumed after a specific number of retries in a way similar to what was already available for standard queues.

Let’s take a more in-depth look at how these work in practice.

FIFO queues throughput increase up to 70K TPS
FIFO queues are designed for applications that require messages to be processed exactly once and in the order in which they are sent. While standard queues have an unlimited throughput, FIFO queues have an upper quota in the number of TPS per API action.

Standard and FIFO queues support batch actions that can send and receive up to 10 messages with a single API call (up to a maximum total payload of 256 KB). This means that a FIFO queue can process up to 10 times more messages per second than its maximum throughput.

At launch in 2016, FIFO queues supported up to 300 TPS per API action (3,000 messages per second with batching). This was enough for many use cases, but some customers asked for more throughput.

With high throughput mode launched in 2021, FIFO queues introduced a tenfold increase of the maximum throughput and could process up to 3,000 TPS per API action, depending on the Region. One year later, that quota was doubled to up to 6,000 TPS per API action.

This year, Amazon SQS has already increased FIFO queue throughput quota two times, to up to 9,000 TPS per API action in August and up to 18,000 TPS per API action in October (depending on the Region).

Today, the Amazon SQS team has been able to increase the FIFO queue throughput quota again, allowing you to process up to 70,000 TPS per API action (up to 700,000 messages per second with batching) in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland) Regions. This is more than two hundred times the maximum throughput at launch.

DLQ redrive support for FIFO queues
With Amazon SQS, messages that are not consumed after a specific number of retries can automatically be moved to a DLQ. There, messages can be analyzed to understand the reason why they have not been processed correctly. Sometimes there is a bug or a misconfiguration in the consumer application. Other times the messages contain invalid data from the source applications that needs to be fixed to allow the messages to be processed again.

Either way, you can define a plan to reprocess these messages. For example, you can fix the consumer application and redrive all messages to the source queue. Or you can create a dedicated queue where a custom application receives the messages, fixes their content, and then sends them to the source queue.

To simplify moving the messages back to the source queue or to a different queue, Amazon SQS allows you to create a redrive task. Redrive tasks are already available for standard queues. Starting today, you can also start a redrive task for FIFO queues.

Using the Amazon SQS console, I create a first queue (my-dlq.fifo) to be used as a DLQ. To redrive messages back to the source FIFO queue, the queue type must match, so this is also a FIFO queue.

Then, I create a source FIFO queue (my-source-queue.fifo) to handle messages as usual. When I create the source queue, I configure the first queue (my-dlq.fifo) as the DLQ and specify 3 as the Maximum receives condition under which messages are moved from the source queue to the DLQ.

Console screenshot.

When a message has been received by a consumer for more than the number of times specified by this condition, Amazon SQS moves the message to the DLQ. The original message ID is retained and can be used to uniquely track the message.

To test this setup, I use the console to send a message to the source queue. Then, I use the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) to receive the message multiple times without deleting it.

aws sqs receive-message --queue-url https://sqs.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/123412341234/my-source-queue.fifo
{
    "Messages": [
        {
            "MessageId": "ef2f1c72-4bfe-4093-a451-03fe2dbd4d0f",
            "ReceiptHandle": "...",
            "MD5OfBody": "0f445a578fbcb0c06ca8aeb90a36fcfb",
            "Body": "My important message."
        }
    ]
}

To receive the same message more than once, I wait for the time specified in the queue visibility timeout to pass (30 seconds by default).

After the third time, the message is not in the source queue because it has been moved to the DLQ. When I try to receive messages from the source queue, the list is empty.

aws sqs receive-message --queue-url https://sqs.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/123412341234/my-source-queue.fifo
{
    "Messages": []
}

To confirm that the message has been moved, I poll the DLQ to see if the message is there.

aws sqs receive-message --queue-url https://sqs.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/123412341234/my-dlq.fifo  
{
    "Messages": [
        {
            "MessageId": "ef2f1c72-4bfe-4093-a451-03fe2dbd4d0f",
            "ReceiptHandle": "...",
            "MD5OfBody": "0f445a578fbcb0c06ca8aeb90a36fcfb",
            "Body": "My important message."
        }
    ]
}

Now that the message is in the DLQ, I can investigate why the message has not been processed (well, I know the reason this time) and decide whether to redrive messages from the DLQ using the Amazon SQS console or the new redrive API that was introduced a few months ago. For this example, I use the console. Back on the Amazon SQS console, I select the DLQ queue and choose Start DLQ redrive.

In Redrive configuration, I choose to redrive the messages to the source queue. Optionally, I can specify another FIFO queue as a custom destination. I use System optimized in Velocity control settings to redrive messages with the maximum number of messages per second optimized by Amazon SQS. Optionally, if there is a large number of messages in the DLQ, I can configure a custom maximum rate of messages per second to avoid overloading consumers.

Console screenshot.

Before starting the redrive task, I can use the Inspect messages section to poll and check messages. I already decided what to do, so I choose DLQ redrive to start the task. I have only one message to process, so the redrive task completes very quickly.

Console screenshot.

As expected, the message is back in the source queue and is ready to be processed again.

Console screenshot.

Things to know
Dead letter queue (DLQ) support for FIFO queues is available today in all AWS Regions where Amazon SQS is offered with the exception of GovCloud Regions and those based in China.

In the DLQ configuration, the maximum number of receives should be between 1 and 1,000.

There is no additional cost for using high throughput mode or a DLQ. Every Amazon SQS action counts as a request. A single request can send or receive from 1 to 10 messages, up to a maximum total payload of 256 KB. You pay based on the number of requests, and requests are priced differently between standard and FIFO queues.

As part of the AWS Free Tier, there is no cost for the first million requests per month for standard queues and for the first million requests per month for FIFO queues. For more information, see Amazon SQS pricing.

With these updates and the increased throughput, you can cover the vast majority of use cases with FIFO queues.

Use Amazon SQS FIFO queues to have high throughput, exactly-once processing, and first-in-first-out delivery.

— Danilo

Simplify your SMS setup with the new Amazon Pinpoint SMS console

Post Syndicated from hamzarau original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/send-sms-using-the-new-amazon-pinpoint-sms-console/

Amazon Pinpoint is a multichannel communication service that helps application developers engage their customers through communication channels such as SMS or text messaging, email, mobile push, voice, and in-app messaging.

Amazon Pinpoint SMS provides the global scale, resiliency, and flexibility required to deliver SMS and voice messaging in web, mobile, or business applications. SMS messaging is used for use cases like one-time passcode validation, time sensitive alerts, and two-way chat due to its global reach and ubiquity. Today Amazon Pinpoint SMS sends messages to over 240 countries and regions. In this post, we will review how to use the new Pinpoint SMS management console to get your SMS resources setup correctly the first time.

This blog walks through the setup and configuration steps for Pinpoint SMS using the management console. Additionally, all setup and configurations can also be completed using Pinpoint SMS APIs. For more information visit the Pinpoint SMS documentation, or complete the Amazon Pinpoint SMS workshop.

The Pinpoint SMS management console provides control for the existing functionality of the Pinpoint SMS APIs to create, and manage your SMS and voice resources. In addition, the Pinpoint SMS console has a Quick start – SMS setup guide or Request originator flow to guide you through the setup process and for requesting and managing your SMS resources.

If you require additional background on how SMS works using Amazon Pinpoint SMS, refer to How to Manage Global Sending of SMS with Amazon Pinpoint. Below are some important SMS concepts we’ll highlight in this blog post.

Important SMS Concepts and Resources

  • Phone pool: The phone pool resource is a collection of phone numbers and sender IDs that all share the same settings and provide failover if a number becomes unavailable.
  • Originator: An originator refers to either a phone number or sender ID.
  • Phone number: Also called originator number, a phone number is a numeric string of numbers that identifies the sender. This can be a long code, short code, toll-free number (TFN), or 10-digit long code (10DLC). For more information see choosing a phone number or sender ID.
  • Verified destination phone number: When your account is in Sandbox you can only send SMS messages to phone numbers that have gone through the verification process. The phone number receives an SMS message with a verification code. The received code must be entered into the console to complete the process.
  • Simulator phone number: A simulator phone number behaves as any other origination and destination phone number without sending the SMS message to mobile carriers. Simulator phone numbers do not require registration and are used for testing scenarios.
  • Sender ID: Also called originator ID, a sender ID is an alphanumeric string that identifies the sender. For more information see choosing a phone number or sender ID.
  • Registered phone number: Some countries require you to register your company’s identity before you can purchase phone numbers or sender IDs. They also require a review of the messages that you send to recipients in their country. Registrations are processed by external third parties, so the amount of time to process a registration varies by phone number type and country. After all required registrations are complete, the status of your phone numbers changes to Active and is available for use. For more information about which countries require registration see, supported countries and regions (SMS channel).

Getting started

Sign-in to the AWS management console and search for Amazon Pinpoint. If you don’t have an existing AWS account, complete the following steps to create one.

In the Amazon Pinpoint console, you can choose between managing Pinpoint SMS and Pinpoint campaign orchestration. Pinpoint SMS is the place where applications developers go to setup and configure their associated resources for SMS sending through any AWS service. Pinpoint campaign orchestration is for builders who want to manage their customer segments and send messages using campaigns, or multi-step journeys. Campaign orchestration utilizes communication channels like Pinpoint SMS or Amazon SES (simple email service) to deliver its messages. In this blog, we will discuss how to configure Pinpoint SMS using its management console.

Amazon Pinpoint SMS Console

Quick start – SMS setup guide

Once you’ve selected the Amazon Pinpoint SMS console, you will land on the Overview page. On this page, you get a summary of your SMS resources and the Quick start – SMS setup guide. This guide will walk you through creating the appropriate SMS resources to start sending SMS messages. The steps outlined in the Quick start guide are recommended but not required.

Step 1: Create a phone pool

A phone pool is a collection of phone numbers and sender IDs that all share the same settings and provide failover if a number becomes unavailable. Phone pools provide the benefit of managing for number resiliency, removes the complexity from sending applications, and provides a logical grouping to manage phone numbers and sender IDs. For example, phone pools can be grouped by use-case such as having a phone pool for OTP (one-time password) messages.

In the navigation pane, under Overview, in the Quick start section, choose Create pool. Under the pool setup section, enter a name for your pool in Pool name. To create a pool, you will need to select an origination identity, either a phone number or sender ID to associate with the pool. Additional origination identities can be added once the pool is created on the Phone pools page. If you don’t have an active phone number or sender ID in your account, we recommend selecting a simulator number, which can be used for testing and does not require any registration. Once you’ve selected an origination identity, you can choose Create phone pool to complete step 1.

Setting up phone pools for sending SMS

Step 2: Create a configuration set

A configuration set is a set of rules that are applied when you send a message. For example, a configuration set can specify a destination for events related to a message. When SMS events occur (such as delivery or failure events), they are routed to the destination associated with the configuration set that you specified when you sent the message. You’re not required to use configuration sets when you send messages, but we recommend that you do. We support sending SMS and voice events to Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Kinesis DataFirehose, and Amazon SNS.

In the navigation pane, under Overview, in the Quick start section, choose Create set. Under the Configuration set details section, enter a name in Configuration set name. For Event Destination setup, choose either the quick start option to create a Cloud formation stack to automatically create and configure CloudWatch, Kinesis DataFirehose, and SNS to log all events or the advanced option to manually select which event destinations you would like to setup. Once you’ve made the selection, choose Create Configuration set to complete step 2.

How to create a configuration set for sending SMS

Step 3: Test SMS sending

Send a test message using the SMS simulator. Select an originator to send from, and a destination number to send to. To track the status of your message, add a configuration set to publish SMS events.

In the navigation pane, under Overview, in the Quick start section, choose Test SMS sending. Under the Originator section, select either a phone pool, phone number, or sender ID in your account to send test messages from. Next, under the Destination phone number section, select either a simulator number or active destination number to send test messages to. If your account is in Sandbox, you can only send messages to simulator numbers or verified destination numbers. Once your account is in Production you can send messages to simulator numbers or any active destination number. You can (optionally) select a configuration set to track your SMS events. Next, under the Message body section, enter a sample message and send the test message.

Note – If you are sending from a US simulator number (or using a phone pool that only contains a US simulator number) you can only send messages to US simulator destination numbers. A simulator phone number behaves like any other phone number without sending the SMS message to mobile carriers.

SMS simulator in the SMS console

Step 4: Request production Access

Finally, if your account is in Sandbox there are limits to the amount you can spend and can only send to verified destination phone numbers. Request moving your account from Sandbox to Production to remove these limits. To move to Production, open a case with AWS Support Center.

Conclusion

After following the request for Production access, you’ve completed the recommended steps to get your account configuration setup. You have now tested and configured the following resources in your account:

  • Phone pool: A phone pool is a collection of phone numbers and sender IDs that all share the same settings and provide failover if a number becomes unavailable. Phone pools provide the benefit of managing for number resiliency, removes the complexity from sending applications, and provides a logical grouping to manage phone numbers and sender IDs.
    • Originator: As part of the pool setup, you are required to associate at least one originator to the phone pool. An originator refers to either a phone number or sender ID. If you’ve selected a simulator number and would like to now request a new phone number or sender ID, you can do so following Request originator flow.
  • Configuration set: A configuration set allows you to organize, track, and configure logging of your SMS events, specifying where to publish them by adding event destinations.

Next steps

To request additional originators such as phone numbers or sender IDs, you can follow the Request Originator flow in the management console. If your originator requires registrations and is supported, you can self-service the phone number or sender ID registration in the management console.

An Overview of Bulk Sender Changes at Yahoo/Gmail

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:

Mask and redact sensitive data published to Amazon SNS using managed and custom data identifiers

Post Syndicated from Otavio Ferreira original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/mask-and-redact-sensitive-data-published-to-amazon-sns-using-managed-and-custom-data-identifiers/

Today, we’re announcing a new capability for Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) message data protection. In this post, we show you how you can use this new capability to create custom data identifiers to detect and protect domain-specific sensitive data, such as your company’s employee IDs. Previously, you could only use managed data identifiers to detect and protect common sensitive data, such as names, addresses, and credit card numbers.

Overview

Amazon SNS is a serverless messaging service that provides topics for push-based, many-to-many messaging for decoupling distributed systems, microservices, and event-driven serverless applications. As applications become more complex, it can become challenging for topic owners to manage the data flowing through their topics. These applications might inadvertently start sending sensitive data to topics, increasing regulatory risk. To mitigate the risk, you can use message data protection to protect sensitive application data using built-in, no-code, scalable capabilities.

To discover and protect data flowing through SNS topics with message data protection, you can associate data protection policies to your topics. Within these policies, you can write statements that define which types of sensitive data you want to discover and protect. Within each policy statement, you can then define whether you want to act on data flowing inbound to an SNS topic or outbound to an SNS subscription, the AWS accounts or specific AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) principals the statement applies to, and the actions you want to take on the sensitive data found.

Now, message data protection provides three actions to help you protect your data. First, the audit operation reports on the amount of sensitive data found. Second, the deny operation helps prevent the publishing or delivery of payloads that contain sensitive data. Third, the de-identify operation can mask or redact the sensitive data detected. These no-code operations can help you adhere to a variety of compliance regulations, such as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

This message data protection feature coexists with the message data encryption feature in SNS, both contributing to an enhanced security posture of your messaging workloads.

Managed and custom data identifiers

After you add a data protection policy to your SNS topic, message data protection uses pattern matching and machine learning models to scan your messages for sensitive data, then enforces the data protection policy in real time. The types of sensitive data are referred to as data identifiers. These data identifiers can be either managed by Amazon Web Services (AWS) or custom to your domain.

Managed data identifiers (MDI) are organized into five categories:

In a data protection policy statement, you refer to a managed data identifier using its Amazon Resource Name (ARN), as follows:

{
    "Name": "__example_data_protection_policy",
    "Description": "This policy protects sensitive data in expense reports",
    "Version": "2021-06-01",
    "Statement": [{
        "DataIdentifier": [
            "arn:aws:dataprotection::aws:data-identifier/CreditCardNumber"
        ],
        "..."
    }]
}

Custom data identifiers (CDI), on the other hand, enable you to define custom regular expressions in the data protection policy itself, then refer to them from policy statements. Using custom data identifiers, you can scan for business-specific sensitive data, which managed data identifiers can’t. For example, you can use a custom data identifier to look for company-specific employee IDs in SNS message payloads. Internally, SNS has guardrails to make sure custom data identifiers are safe and that they add only low single-digit millisecond latency to message processing.

In a data protection policy statement, you refer to a custom data identifier using only the name that you have given it, as follows:

{
    "Name": "__example_data_protection_policy",
    "Description": "This policy protects sensitive data in expense reports",
    "Version": "2021-06-01",
    "Configuration": {
        "CustomDataIdentifier": [{
            "Name": "MyCompanyEmployeeId", "Regex": "EID-\d{9}-US"
        }]
    },
    "Statement": [{
        "DataIdentifier": [
            "arn:aws:dataprotection::aws:data-identifier/CreditCardNumber",
            "MyCompanyEmployeeId"
        ],
        "..."
    }]
}

Note that custom data identifiers can be used in conjunction with managed data identifiers, as part of the same data protection policy statement. In the preceding example, both MyCompanyEmployeeId and CreditCardNumber are in scope.

For more information, see Data Identifiers, in the SNS Developer Guide.

Inbound and outbound data directions

In addition to the DataIdentifier property, each policy statement also sets the DataDirection property (whose value can be either Inbound or Outbound) as well as the Principal property (whose value can be any combination of AWS accounts, IAM users, and IAM roles).

When you use message data protection for data de-identification and set DataDirection to Inbound, instances of DataIdentifier published by the Principal are masked or redacted before the payload is ingested into the SNS topic. This means that every endpoint subscribed to the topic receives the same modified payload.

When you set DataDirection to Outbound, on the other hand, the payload is ingested into the SNS topic as-is. Then, instances of DataIdentifier are either masked, redacted, or kept as-is for each subscribing Principal in isolation. This means that each endpoint subscribed to the SNS topic might receive a different payload from the topic, with different sensitive data de-identified, according to the data access permissions of its Principal.

The following snippet expands the example data protection policy to include the DataDirection and Principal properties.

{
    "Name": "__example_data_protection_policy",
    "Description": "This policy protects sensitive data in expense reports",
    "Version": "2021-06-01",
    "Configuration": {
        "CustomDataIdentifier": [{
            "Name": "MyCompanyEmployeeId", "Regex": "EID-\d{9}-US"
        }]
    },
    "Statement": [{
        "DataIdentifier": [
            "MyCompanyEmployeeId",
            "arn:aws:dataprotection::aws:data-identifier/CreditCardNumber"
        ],
        "DataDirection": "Outbound",
        "Principal": [ "arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/ReportingApplicationRole" ],
        "..."
    }]
}

In this example, ReportingApplicationRole is the authenticated IAM principal that called the SNS Subscribe API at subscription creation time. For more information, see How do I determine the IAM principals for my data protection policy? in the SNS Developer Guide.

Operations for data de-identification

To complete the policy statement, you need to set the Operation property, which informs the SNS topic of the action that it should take when it finds instances of DataIdentifer in the outbound payload.

The following snippet expands the data protection policy to include the Operation property, in this case using the Deidentify object, which in turn supports masking and redaction.

{
    "Name": "__example_data_protection_policy",
    "Description": "This policy protects sensitive data in expense reports",
    "Version": "2021-06-01",
    "Configuration": {
        "CustomDataIdentifier": [{
            "Name": "MyCompanyEmployeeId", "Regex": "EID-\d{9}-US"
        }]
    },
    "Statement": [{
        "Principal": [
            "arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/ReportingApplicationRole"
        ],
        "DataDirection": "Outbound",
        "DataIdentifier": [
            "MyCompanyEmployeeId",
            "arn:aws:dataprotection::aws:data-identifier/CreditCardNumber"
        ],
        "Operation": { "Deidentify": { "MaskConfig": { "MaskWithCharacter": "#" } } }
    }]
}

In this example, the MaskConfig object instructs the SNS topic to mask instances of CreditCardNumber in Outbound messages to subscriptions created by ReportingApplicationRole, using the MaskWithCharacter value, which in this case is the hash symbol (#). Alternatively, you could have used the RedactConfig object instead, which would have instructed the SNS topic to simply cut the sensitive data off the payload.

The following snippet shows how the outbound payload is masked, in real time, by the SNS topic.

// original message published to the topic:
My credit card number is 4539894458086459

// masked message delivered to subscriptions created by ReportingApplicationRole:
My credit card number is ################

For more information, see Data Protection Policy Operations, in the SNS Developer Guide.

Applying data de-identification in a use case

Consider a company where managers use an internal expense report management application where expense reports from employees can be reviewed and approved. Initially, this application depended only on an internal payment application, which in turn connected to an external payment gateway. However, this workload eventually became more complex, because the company started also paying expense reports filed by external contractors. At that point, the company built a mobile application that external contractors could use to view their approved expense reports. An important business requirement for this mobile application was that specific financial and PII data needed to be de-identified in the externally displayed expense reports. Specifically, both the credit card number used for the payment and the internal employee ID that approved the payment had to be masked.

Figure 1: Expense report processing application

Figure 1: Expense report processing application

To distribute the approved expense reports to both the payment application and the reporting application that backed the mobile application, the company used an SNS topic with a data protection policy. The policy has only one statement, which masks credit card numbers and employee IDs found in the payload. This statement applies only to the IAM role that the company used for subscribing the AWS Lambda function of the reporting application to the SNS topic. This access permission configuration enabled the Lambda function from the payment application to continue receiving the raw data from the SNS topic.

The data protection policy from the previous section addresses this use case. Thus, when a message representing an expense report is published to the SNS topic, the Lambda function in the payment application receives the message as-is, whereas the Lambda function in the reporting application receives the message with the financial and PII data masked.

Deploying the resources

You can apply a data protection policy to an SNS topic using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), AWS SDK, or AWS CloudFormation.

To automate the provisioning of the resources and the data protection policy of the example expense management use case, we’re going to use CloudFormation templates. You have two options for deploying the resources:

Deploy using the individual CloudFormation templates in sequence

  1. Prerequisites template: This first template provisions two IAM roles with a managed policy that enables them to create SNS subscriptions and configure the subscriber Lambda functions. You will use these provisioned IAM roles in steps 3 and 4 that follow.
  2. Topic owner template: The second template provisions the SNS topic along with its access policy and data protection policy.
  3. Payment subscriber template: The third template provisions the Lambda function and the corresponding SNS subscription that comprise of the Payment application stack. When prompted, select the PaymentApplicationRole in the Permissions panel before running the template. Moreover, the CloudFormation console will require you to acknowledge that a CloudFormation transform might require access capabilities.
  4. Reporting subscriber template: The final template provisions the Lambda function and the SNS subscription that comprise of the Reporting application stack. When prompted, select the ReportingApplicationRole in the Permissions panel, before running the template. Moreover, the CloudFormation console will require, once again, that you acknowledge that a CloudFormation transform might require access capabilities.
Figure 2: Select IAM role

Figure 2: Select IAM role

Now that the application stacks have been deployed, you’re ready to start testing.

Testing the data de-identification operation

Use the following steps to test the example expense management use case.

  1. In the Amazon SNS console, select the ApprovalTopic, then choose to publish a message to it.
  2. In the SNS message body field, enter the following message payload, representing an external contractor expense report, then choose to publish this message: 
    {
    "expense": {
        "currency": "USD",
        "amount": 175.99,
        "category": "Office Supplies",
        "status": "Approved",
        "created_at": "2023-10-17T20:03:44+0000",
        "updated_at": "2023-10-19T14:21:51+0000"
    },
    "payment": {
        "credit_card_network": "Visa",
        "credit_card_number": "4539894458086459"
    },
    "reviewer": {
        "employee_id": "EID-123456789-US",
        "employee_location": "Seattle, USA"
    },
    "contractor": {
        "employee_id": "CID-000012348-CA",
        "employee_location": "Vancouver, CAN"
    }
}

  3. In the CloudWatch console, select the log group for the PaymentLambdaFunction, then choose to view its latest log stream. Now look for the log stream entry that shows the message payload received by the Lambda function. You will see that no data has been masked in this payload, as the payment application requires raw financial data to process the credit card transaction.
  4. Still in the CloudWatch console, select the log group for the ReportingLambdaFunction, then choose to view its latest log stream. Now look for the log stream entry that shows the message payload received by this Lambda function. You will see that the values for properties credit_card_number and employee_id have been masked, protecting the financial data from leaking into the external reporting application. 
    {
    "expense": {
        "currency": "USD",
        "amount": 175.99,
        "category": "Office Supplies",
        "status": "Approved",
        "created_at": "2023-10-17T20:03:44+0000",
        "updated_at": "2023-10-19T14:21:51+0000"
    },
    "payment": {
        "credit_card_network": "Visa",
        "credit_card_number": "################"
    },
    "reviewer": {
        "employee_id": "################",
        "employee_location": "Seattle, USA"
    },
    "contractor": {
        "employee_id": "CID-000012348-CA",
        "employee_location": "Vancouver, CAN"
    }
}

As shown, different subscribers received different versions of the message payload, according to their sensitive data access permissions.

Cleaning up the resources

After testing, avoid incurring usage charges by deleting the resources that you created. Open the CloudFormation console and delete the four CloudFormation stacks that you created during the walkthrough.

Conclusion

This post showed how you can use Amazon SNS message data protection to discover and protect sensitive data published to or delivered from your SNS topics. The example use case shows how to create a data protection policy that masks messages delivered to specific subscribers if the payloads contain financial or personally identifiable information.

For more details, see message data protection in the SNS Developer Guide. For information on costs, see SNS pricing.

If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this post, start a new thread on AWS re:Post or contact AWS Support.

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Otavio-Ferreira-author

Otavio Ferreira

Otavio is the GM for Amazon SNS, and has been leading the service since 2016, responsible for software engineering, product management, technical program management, and technical operations. Otavio has spoken at AWS conferences—AWS re:Invent and AWS Summit—and written a number of articles for the AWS Compute and AWS Security blogs.

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

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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:

DMARC flow 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 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 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 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 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 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

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:

  1. Create an Amazon SQS queue named ses-bounces-queue.
  2. Create an Amazon SNS topic named ses-bounces-topic.
  3. Configure the Amazon SNS topic to publish to the SQS queue.
  4. 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:

  1. Create an Amazon SQS queue named ses-complaints-queue.
  2. Create an Amazon SNS topic named ses-complaints-topic.
  3. Configure the Amazon SNS topic to publish to the SQS queue.
  4. 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

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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.
  3. 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.

Integrating IBM MQ with Amazon SQS and Amazon SNS using Apache Camel

Post Syndicated from Pascal Vogel original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/integrating-ibm-mq-with-amazon-sqs-and-amazon-sns-using-apache-camel/

This post is written by Joaquin Rinaudo, Principal Security Consultant and Gezim Musliaj, DevOps Consultant.

IBM MQ is a message-oriented middleware (MOM) product used by many enterprise organizations, including global banks, airlines, and healthcare and insurance companies.

Customers often ask us for guidance on how they can integrate their existing on-premises MOM systems with new applications running in the cloud. They’re looking for a cost-effective, scalable and low-effort solution that enables them to send and receive messages from their cloud applications to these messaging systems.

This blog post shows how to set up a bi-directional bridge from on-premises IBM MQ to Amazon MQ, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), and Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS).

This allows your producer and consumer applications to integrate using fully managed AWS messaging services and Apache Camel. Learn how to deploy such a solution and how to test the running integration using SNS, SQS, and a demo IBM MQ cluster environment running on Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) with AWS Fargate.

This solution can also be used as part of a step-by-step migration using the approach described in the blog post Migrating from IBM MQ to Amazon MQ using a phased approach.

Solution overview

The integration consists of an Apache Camel broker cluster that bi-directionally integrates an IBM MQ system and target systems, such as Amazon MQ running ActiveMQ, SNS topics, or SQS queues.

In the following example, AWS services, in this case AWS Lambda and SQS, receive messages published to IBM MQ via an SNS topic:

Solution architecture overview for sending messages

  1. The cloud message consumers (Lambda and SQS) subscribe to the solution’s target SNS topic.
  2. The Apache Camel broker connects to IBM MQ using secrets stored in AWS Secrets Manager and reads new messages from the queue using IBM MQ’s Java library. Only IBM MQ messages are supported as a source.
  3. The Apache Camel broker publishes these new messages to the target SNS topic. It uses the Amazon SNS Extended Client Library for Java to store any messages larger than 256 KB in an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket.
  4. Apache Camel stores any message that cannot be delivered to SNS after two retries in an S3 dead letter queue bucket.

The next diagram demonstrates how the solution sends messages back from an SQS queue to IBM MQ:

Solution architecture overview for sending messages

  1. A sample message producer using Lambda sends messages to an SQS queue. It uses the Amazon SQS Extended Client Library for Java to send messages larger than 256 KB.
  2. The Apache Camel broker receives the messages published to SQS, using the SQS Extended Client Library if needed.
  3. The Apache Camel broker sends the message to the IBM MQ target queue.
  4. As before, the broker stores messages that cannot be delivered to IBM MQ in the S3 dead letter queue bucket.

A phased live migration consists of two steps:

  1. Deploy the broker service to allow reading messages from and writing to existing IBM MQ queues.
  2. Once the consumer or producer is migrated, migrate its counterpart to the newly selected service (SNS or SQS).

Next, you will learn how to set up the solution using the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK).

Deploying the solution

Prerequisites

  • AWS CDK
  • TypeScript
  • Java
  • Docker
  • Git
  • Yarn

Step 1: Cloning the repository

Clone the repository using git:

git clone https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-ibm-mq-adapter

Step 2: Setting up test IBM MQ credentials

This demo uses IBM MQ’s mutual TLS authentication. To do this, you must generate X.509 certificates and store them in AWS Secrets Manager by running the following commands in the app folder:

  1. Generate X.509 certificates: 
    ./deploy.sh generate_secrets
  2. Set up the secrets required for the Apache Camel broker (replace <integration-name> with, for example, dev): 
    ./deploy.sh create_secrets broker <integration-name>
  3. Set up secrets for the mock IBM MQ system: 
    ./deploy.sh create_secrets mock
  4. Update the cdk.json file with the secrets ARN output from the previous commands:
    • IBM_MOCK_PUBLIC_CERT_ARN
    • IBM_MOCK_PRIVATE_CERT_ARN
    • IBM_MOCK_CLIENT_PUBLIC_CERT_ARN
    • IBMMQ_TRUSTSTORE_ARN
    • IBMMQ_TRUSTSTORE_PASSWORD_ARN
    • IBMMQ_KEYSTORE_ARN
    • IBMMQ_KEYSTORE_PASSWORD_ARN

If you are using your own IBM MQ system and already have X.509 certificates available, you can use the script to upload those certificates to AWS Secrets Manager after running the script.

Step 3: Configuring the broker

The solution deploys two brokers, one to read messages from the test IBM MQ system and one to send messages back. A separate Apache Camel cluster is used per integration to support better use of Auto Scaling functionality and to avoid issues across different integration operations (consuming and reading messages).

Update the cdk.json file with the following values:

  • accountId: AWS account ID to deploy the solution to.
  • region: name of the AWS Region to deploy the solution to.
  • defaultVPCId: specify a VPC ID for an existing VPC in the AWS account where the broker and mock are deployed.
  • allowedPrincipals: add your account ARN (e.g., arn:aws:iam::123456789012:root) to allow this AWS account to send messages to and receive messages from the broker. You can use this parameter to set up cross-account relationships for both SQS and SNS integrations and support multiple consumers and producers.

Step 4: Bootstrapping and deploying the solution

  1. Make sure you have the correct AWS_PROFILE and AWS_REGION environment variables set for your development account.
  2. Run yarn cdk bootstrap –-qualifier mq <aws://<account-id>/<region> to bootstrap CDK.
  3. Run yarn install to install CDK dependencies.
  4. Finally, execute yarn cdk deploy '*-dev' –-qualifier mq --require-approval never to deploy the solution to the dev environment.

Step 5: Testing the integrations

Use AWS System Manager Session Manager and port forwarding to establish tunnels to the test IBM MQ instance to access the web console and send messages manually. For more information on port forwarding, see Amazon EC2 instance port forwarding with AWS System Manager.

  1. In a command line terminal, make sure you have the correct AWS_PROFILE and AWS_REGION environment variables set for your development account.
  2. In addition, set the following environment variables:
    • IBM_ENDPOINT: endpoint for IBM MQ. Example: network load balancer for IBM mock mqmoc-mqada-1234567890.elb.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com.
    • BASTION_ID: instance ID for the bastion host. You can retrieve this output from Step 4: Bootstrapping and deploying the solution listed after the mqBastionStack deployment.

    Use the following command to set the environment variables:

    export IBM_ENDPOINT=mqmoc-mqada-1234567890.elb.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com
export BASTION_ID=i-0a1b2c3d4e5f67890
  3. Run the script test/connect.sh.
  4. Log in to the IBM web console via https://127.0.0.1:9443/admin using the default IBM user (admin) and the password stored in AWS Secrets Manager as mqAdapterIbmMockAdminPassword.

Sending data from IBM MQ and receiving it in SNS:

  1. In the IBM MQ console, access the local queue manager QM1 and DEV.QUEUE.1.
  2. Send a message with the content Hello AWS. This message will be processed by AWS Fargate and published to SNS.
  3. Access the SQS console and choose the snsIntegrationStack-dev-2 prefix queue. This is an SQS queue subscribed to the SNS topic for testing.
  4. Select Send and receive message.
  5. Select Poll for messages to see the Hello AWS message previously sent to IBM MQ.

Sending data back from Amazon SQS to IBM MQ:

  1. Access the SQS console and choose the queue with the prefix sqsPublishIntegrationStack-dev-3-dev.
  2. Select Send and receive messages.
  3. For Message Body, add Hello from AWS.
  4. Choose Send message.
  5. In the IBM MQ console, access the local queue manager QM1 and DEV.QUEUE.2 to find your message listed under this queue.

Step 6: Cleaning up

Run cdk destroy '*-dev' to destroy the resources deployed as part of this walkthrough.

Conclusion

In this blog, you learned how you can exchange messages between IBM MQ and your cloud applications using Amazon SQS and Amazon SNS.

If you’re interested in getting started with your own integration, follow the README file in the GitHub repository. If you’re migrating existing applications using industry-standard APIs and protocols such as JMS, NMS, or AMQP 1.0, consider integrating with Amazon MQ using the steps provided in the repository.

If you’re interested in running Apache Camel in Kubernetes, you can also adapt the architecture to use Apache Camel K instead.

For more serverless learning resources, visit Serverless Land.

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

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.

Building Generative AI into Marketing Strategies: A Primer

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

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 Build an Email Service on SES

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

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
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_1Ajinkya 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.

Amazon SES – How to track email deliverability to domain level with CloudWatch

Post Syndicated from Alaa Hammad original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/amazon-ses-how-to-track-email-deliverability-to-domain-level-with-cloudwatch/

Why is it important to track email deliverability per domain with Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)?

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is a scalable cloud email service provider that enables businesses to build a large-scale email solution and host multiple domains from the same SES account for different purposes ex: one domain for sending marketing emails such as special offers, another domain to send transactional emails such as order confirmations, and other types of correspondence such as newsletters.

As your product, service or solution built on Amazon SES grows and you require multiple domains verified, it is important to track email deliverability for emails you send from each domain for business continuity, billing purposes or incidents investigations. This can be useful to identify if you have low email deliverability for your business domain or if you have a domain generating high bounce or complaint rates and take proactive actions before impacting the account’s ability to send emails from any other domains.

SES offers features that automatically manage deliverability per domain through Virtual Deliverability Manager. Virtual Deliverability Manager helps enhance email deliverability and provides insights into sending and delivery data, as well as offering solutions to fix negative email sending reputation. You can learn more about Virtual Deliverability Manager here.

Solution Walkthrough

Amazon SES provides a way to monitor sender reputation metrics such as bounce and complaint rates per account or configuration sets using event publishing. This blog will discuss how you can use Amazon SES message auto-tags to monitor and publish email deliverability events (Send, Delivery, Bounce, Complaints) to CloudWatch custom metrics per domain. In addition, you will see how to create a custom CloudWatch dashboard that’s easy to access in a single view to monitor your domain metrics. This CloudWatch dashboard can help to provide guidance for your team members during operational events about how to respond to specific incidents for your sending domain.

What are Amazon SES Auto-Tags:

Message tags are a form of name/value pairs to categorize the email you are sending. For example, if you advertise books, you could name a message tag general, and assign a value of sci-fi or western, when you send an email for the associated campaign. Depending on which email sending interface you use, you can provide the message tag as a parameter to the API call (SendEmail, SendRawEmail) or as an Amazon SES-specific email header.

In addition to the message tags you add to any emails you send, Amazon SES adds a set of Auto-Tags that are automatically included in any emails you send. You don’t need to pass the parameters of the auto-tags to the API call or email headers since SES does this automatically.

The auto-tags in the list below are used to track the email deliverability for specific events ( ex: Send, Delivery, Bounce, Complaint). SES does this by using the name/value pairs of the auto-tag name as a dimension in CloudWatch metric to track the count of events of specific auto-tag. This blog post will use “ses:from-domain” auto-tag to configure event publishing for tracking and publish email deliverability events (Send, Delivery, Bounce, Complaints) you receive per domain to CloudWatch metrics and CloudWatch dashboard.

Amazon SES auto-tags added to messages you send

Prerequisites:

For this walkthrough, you should have the following prerequisites:

Configure Amazon SES to publish email deliverability events to CloudWatch destination:

To configure event publishing for tracking email deliverability events, you first need to create a configuration set. Configuration sets in SES are groups of rules, that you can apply to your verified identities. When you apply a configuration set to an email, all of the rules in that configuration set are applied to the email.

After your configuration set is created, you need to create Amazon SES event destination. Amazon SES will send all email deliverability events you intend to track to this event destination. In this blog the event destination is Amazon CloudWatch.

    1. Sign in to the Amazon SES console.
    2. In the navigation pane, under Configuration, choose Configuration sets. Choose Create set.
    3. Enter Configuration set name, leave the rest of fields to default, scroll to the send and click on Create set.
    4. Under configuration set home page click on Event destinations tab and select Add destination
    5. Add SES event destination to configuration set
    6. Under Select event types, check Sends, Deliveries, Hard bounces and Complaints boxes and click Next.
    7. selecting event types to track
    8. Under Specify destination, Select Amazon CloudWatch.
    9. Select event destination as Amazon CloudWatch
    10. Name – enter the name of the destination for this configuration set. The name can include letters, numbers, dashes, and hyphens. (example : Tracking_per_Domain)
    11. Under Amazon CloudWatch dimensions, Select Value source: Message tag , Dimension name: ses:from-domain and Default value: example.com (you will need to add the verified domain name you want to track) as shown below:
    12. add message auto-tag as CloudWatch dimension to track
    13. Review, When you are satisfied that your entries are correct, Click Add destination to add your event destination.

Send a test email via Amazon SES mailbox simulator to trigger events in CloudWatch custom metric.

After selected Amazon CloudWatch as event destination , Amazon CloudWatch will create a custom metric with the auto-tag dimension and value you chose. For this custom metric to appear in CloudWatch Console, you must send an email to trigger each selected event. We recommend using the Amazon SES Mailbox Simulator to avoid generating real bounces or complaints that could impact your account’s reputation.

In the below section, This blog will show how to send those test emails to the following recipients manually using CLI. If you would like to use the console method to send those emails. you will need to send three separate test emails since the console will only allow one recipient per message:

Amazon SES Mailbox Simulator recipients to trigger the events in CloudWatch metrics:
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]

Note: You must pass the name of the configuration set when sending an email. This can be done by either specifying the configuration set name in the headers of emails, or specifying it as a default configuration set. This can be done at the time of identity creation, or later while editing a verified identity.

The following example uses send-emailCLI command to send a formatted email to the Amazon SES simulator recipients:

Before you run any commands, set your default credentials by following Configuring the AWS CLI. The IAM user must has “ses:SendEmail” permission to send email.

  1. Navigate to your terminal where the AWS CLI is installed and configured. Create message.json file for the message to send and add the following content:
  2. {
"Subject": {
"Data": "Testing CW events with email simulator",
"Charset": "UTF-8"
},
"Body": {
"Text": {
"Data": "This is the message body of testing CW events with email similulator.",
"Charset": "UTF-8"
}
}
}
  3. Create a destination.json file to add Amazon SES simulator recipients for bounces, complaints and delivery events as shown below:
  4. { 

"ToAddresses": ["[email protected]", "[email protected]" , "[email protected]"]

}
  5. Send a test email using send-email CLI command to send a formatted email to the Amazon SES simulator recipients:
  6. aws ses send-email --from [email protected] --destination file://destination.json --message file://message.json --configuration-set-name SES_Config_Set --region <AWS Region>
  7. After the message sent, you are expected to see the following output:
  8. {

"MessageId": "EXAMPLEf3a5efcd1-51adec81-d2a4-4e3f-9fe2-5d85c1b23783-000000"

}

Now you sent a test email to trigger the events you want to track in CloudWatch custom metrics. Lets create the CloudWatch dashboard to see those metrics.

Create CloudWatch dashboard to track the email deliverability events for my domain.

  1. Sign in to the Amazon CloudWatch console.
  2. In the navigation pane, choose Dashboards, and then choose Create dashboard.
  3. In the Create new dashboard dialog box, enter a name like ‘CW_Domain_Tracking’ for the dashboard, and then choose Create dashboard.
  4. In the Add Widget dialog box, Choose Number to add a number displaying a metric to the dashboard and then choose Next
  5. Under Add metric graph, click on edit sign to rename the graph with your domain example.com . this will make it easy for you to select the dashboard of the domain if you have multiple domains.
  6. In the Browse tab , Select the AWS region where you are running your SES account and in the search bar, search for “ses:from-domain”.
  7. You will get four metrics returned with your domain name “example.com”. Select checkbox beside the four metrics and click Create widget.
  8. CloudWatch dashboard with the metrics
  9. Save dashboard in the top right corner of the dashboard page to save the widget settings.
  10. Save CloudWatch dashboard settings

After the CloudWatch dashboard created, for any email you send from example.com domain with configuration set name passed in the email header, The email deliverability events will be counted in your CloudWatch metrics and you will be able to see them in the CloudWatch dashboard.

As an additional step. You can also setup a CloudWatch alarms for this custom metrics and add a threshold for each metric. When the metric breach the threshold, the alarm goes on and send an SNS notification to you to take the necessary actions.

Cleaning Up:

This setup includes Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon SES service charges. To avoid incurring any extra charges, remember to delete any resources created manually if you no longer need them for monitoring.

Resources to delete from Amazon SES console.

  1. In the navigation pane, under Configuration, choose Configuration sets.
  2. Check the box beside Configuration set you created and select Delete.

Resources to delete from Amazon CloudWatch console.

  1. In the navigation pane, choose Dashboards, and then choose the dashboard you created.
  2. In the upper-right corner of the graph that you want to remove, choose Actions, and then choose Delete Dashboard.
  3. Save dashboard.

Conclusion:

You have now seen how to configure Amazon SES to track email deliverability at domain level with CloudWatch dashboard. Tracking email deliverability for emails you send from each domain is essential for business continuity, billing purposes or incidents investigations. Using SES message auto-tags and CloudWatch metrics you can identify the domains that have low email deliverability quickly and take necessary actions to maximize your email deliverability and take proactive actions before impacting the account’s ability to send emails from any other domains.

About the author:

Alaa Hammad

Alaa Hammad is a Senior Cloud Support Engineer at AWS and subject matter expert in Amazon Simple Email Service and AWS Backup service. She has a 10 years of diverse experience in supporting enterprise customers across different industries. She enjoys cooking and try new recipes from different cuisines.

How to send your first email on SES

Post Syndicated from Dustin Taylor original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/how-to-send-your-first-email-on-ses/

Introduction

Sending your first email on any service can be complicated. In this blog we will walk you through how to send your first email on Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) through the SES Console and to direct you to examples of how you can send email through the AWS SDK. Our public documentation includes additional information on how you can configure SES. We encourage you to read through these documents to learn about these other mechanisms in the future.

Getting Started

Getting started with sending an email on SES requires three actions which are: 1) verifying a domain or email address 2) requesting production access to SES and 3) sending your first email. Let’s walk through each of these steps and send our first email.

Verifying an Identity

To start, you will configure what email address or domain your customers will receive emails from. As part of this verification, you will need to be able to either receive a confirmation email at the email address you are trying to setup, or to publish CNAME records for your intended domain. Generally, we recommend using a domain for your email sending as this gives you the ability to set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC alignment which will increase recipient trust in your emails. Email addresses can be used for account-specific email sending where a customer may not own a domain, but this type of use-case is prone to receiving entities having low trust in the sender and a lower probability of inbox placement. For more in-depth instructions please review our public documentation as I will briefly touch on the most important pieces to verifying a domain or email address.

To verify an identity, you can go to the SES Console and click the ‘Verified identities’ link on the left-hand side of the screen. It will then present you with a list of verified domains or email addresses currently in your account if they were previously verified. There is a yellow button that states ‘Create identity’, when you click this you will be presented with a screen to choose whether to verify an email address or domain.

Email Address Verification

To verify an email address, you will be prompted with the following dialog:

The dialog presented to a sender when they choose to verify an email address in the SES console.

To verify an email address to use as your sending identity, you will include the address in the ‘Email address’ field and then click the ‘Create identity’ button. This will trigger an automated email to the address with a verification link that will need to be clicked to verify ownership of the email address. Once verified, you can begin sending emails from your new email address identity.

Domain Verification

To start verifying a domain you will click the ‘Verified identities’ option from the ‘Configuration’ dropdown which can be found on the left side of the screen. When choosing to verify a domain, you will be presented with a series of dialogs which include:

The dialog presented to a sender that prompts a decision to verify a domain or email address.

Here you will need to include the domain you intend to use for email sending. If you are keeping to a basic configuration on SES this will be the only data you need to add to this dialog. However, it is recommended to also use a custom mail-from. A custom mail-from is a way for you to remove the amazonses.com domain from your mail-from header to ensure domain alignment throughout your headers. You can find more information about the custom mail-from addresses in our documentation.

After finishing your changes in the first dialog you will then be presented with a second dialog that looks like the following:

The dialog which allows a sender to verify the domain they intend to use to send email.

To verify the domain, you will need to utilize either the Easy DKIM feature, or to provide a DKIM authentication token if you plan to DKIM sign your own messages. In selecting the ‘Easy DKIM’ option, you will be presented with the option to use either 1024 bit or 2048 bit signing key length. We would recommend utilizing the 2048 bit signing key length for most customers as this is the more secure key.

If you use Amazon Route53 as your DNS provider, SES can automatically publish DNS records for your domain. If not, this step will require you to edit your DNS records to include three CNAME records which are used for the DKIM signature process and as a mechanism to prove domain ownership. An example of the CNAME records is as follows:

An example dialog of the CNAME records that are generated when attempting to verify an identity.

Once you have placed these DNS records SES will periodically attempt to look-up the records to change the status of your domain verification. If SES doesn’t automatically update the status, you are presented with the option to force another check to verify the records are present.

After your domain verification is successful, you are now ready to send emails from any email address for your domain.

Requesting Production Access

Now that you’ve verified an identity, the next step is to be able to send an email to an unverified identity you will need to request production access. If you only want to test to your own domain or email address you can skip this step until you are ready to send to unverified recipients.

Note: This is region-based, a request for production access is limited to the region in which you are requesting. 

To begin this process, you will navigate to the SES Console and the ‘Account dashboard’ section. Once you are on this page you will be presented with the following dialog at the top of your screen.

Clicking the ‘Request production access’ button will then navigate to the ‘Request details’ page which you can reference below.

The dialog from the SES console showing that the SES account is still in the sandbox.
Fill out each section with the details of your mail-type, website URL, use case description, and then acknowledging that you have read and agree to the AWS Service Terms and Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). When filling out the use case description, provide as much detail as you can for your request as our teams will review to determine if we need more information before approving or denying your request. An example of a good use case description would look like the following:

“Example.com is the domain my company intends to use to send our transactional emails. Our recipients are all customers who have either signed up for an account, requested a new password, or have made purchases through our website. We require confirmation of opt-in for all our new accounts and if no confirmation is received, we do not attempt to send an email to that address.”

Note: SES will review your production access request and will provide feedback on your use case and whether it could pose a risk to the sending reputation of SES, our customers, or your own sending domain.

Finally, click the ‘Submit request’ button to submit your request for production access. This will create an AWS Support case and will be reviewed by our team. These requests are reviewed with a 24-hour Service Level Agreement (SLA). While you are waiting for production access you can send test emails to any of the Mailbox Simulator endpoints or to your own verified domain(s) or email address(es).

Sending Your First Email

From the Console

To send your first email from the SES Console you will need to start by clicking the ‘Verified identities’ option from the ‘Configuration’ dropdown which can be found on the left side of the screen. From here you will select the domain and/or email address you want to send your email from and then click the ‘Send test email’ button, which will open the following screen:

The message details dialog where a sender can send an email from the SES console

From here you will fill out the ‘From-address’ box with the local name (anything before the @ sign) that you want to use to send the email. If you want to test SES functionality you can choose any of the dropdown events present, or you can choose the ‘Custom’ option which will allow you to set a ‘Custom recipient’ address of your choosing. Then you will fill out the ‘Subject’ and ‘Body’ fields with the content you will use for this first test email and then click the ‘Send test email’ button.

Congratulations, you’ve sent your first email from the SES Console! Now, utilizing SES to send single emails from the console isn’t the most scalable way to send email. In the next section, I will provide you links to our documentation for the 5 programming languages supported with the AWS SDK so that you can begin building your integration with SES.

From Code

The AWS Documentation includes some code snippets on how to send an email with SES via the AWS SDK. You can find examples of how to send an email from languages such as: .NET, Java, PHP, Ruby, and Python. We highly recommend reviewing our documentation to see these introductory code snippets to get you started.

Conclusion

Hopefully this blog post has aided you in your journey to send your first email through SES. From verifying a domain, requesting production access, and finally sending an email through the console. Take this knowledge and build upon it for future success in sending email through SES. Happy sending!