Using Amazon SES with Rails ActionMailer

Setting up Rails 3.2 for sending emails using Amazon's Simple Email Service (SES) is easy. You do not require any additional gem or monkey patching to make it work.

SES supports both STARTTLS over SMTP as well as TLS/SSL. The following demonstrates how to set up Rails for STARTTLS with SES.

Prerequisites

1. If you are running rails Mac OS X, you may need to configure OpenSSL for Ruby correctly before you can use STARTTLS. If you are using Ruby 1.9.3 and RVM, here is one way to do this:

   rvm pkg install opensslrvm reinstall 1.9.3 --with-openssl-dir=$rvm_path/usr 

If you do not do this, there is a possibility that Ruby will segfault when you try to send an email.

2. Make sure you have verified your sender email address with AWS. You can only send emails with a verified email address as the sender. Go to the "Verified Senders" option on the left menu in AWS console for SES.

3. Make sure you have the AWS SMTP user name and password for authentication. Go to the "SMTP Settings" option on the left menu in AWS console for SES to set this up. You will first be prompted to create an IAM user (default: ses-smtp-user) and then you will be shown the SMTP user and password, which look like usual AWS key and secret. Note that the IAM user, i.e., ses-smtp-user is not the SMTP user that you will be using for authentication.

Configuring Rails

In config/environments/development.rb and config/environments/production.rb, add the following:

  config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :smtp  config.action_mailer.smtp_settings = {      :address => "email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com",      :port => 587, # Port 25 is throttled on AWS      :user_name => "...", # Your SMTP user here.      :password => "...", # Your SMTP password here.      :authentication => :login,      :enable_starttls_auto => true  }

Sending an email

This is it. Now you can go ahead and create a mailer and start sending emails for fun and profit!

Create a sample mailer

rails g mailer user_mailer

In app/mailer/user_mailer.rb:

    class UserMailer < ActionMailer::Base      # Make sure to set this to your verified sender!      default from: "your@verifiedsender.com"        def test(email)        mail(:to => email, :subject => "Hello World!")      end    end 

In views/user_mailer/test.erb:

    A quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

Now, launch the console and shoot off a test email:

    rails c    Loading development environment (Rails 3.2.1)    1.9.3p125 :001 > UserMailer.test("your@email.com").deliver

I also have a gem out that supports sending e-mail through SES from Rails 3:

https://github.com/drewblas/aws-ses

It also has all the API for verifying/managing e-mail addresses

For TLS SSL setup [Recommended by Amazon SES]

Spoiler Alert: NO GEM Required

smtp is defualt way of sending email in rails but you can add this line to explicitly define in config/application.rb file

config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :smtp

In config/application.rb or you can specify in certain environment file

config.action_mailer.smtp_settings = {    address: 'Amazon SES SMTP HOSTNAME',    port: 465,   #TLS port    domain: 'example.com',    user_name: 'SMTP_USERNAME',    password: 'SMTP_PASSWORD',    authentication: 'plain',   #you can also use login    ssl: true,   #For TLS SSL connection}

The Amazon SES SMTP HOSTNAME is specific for every region, so you that name which you are in, following are hostnames wrt regions.

1. email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com (for region us-east-1)
2. email-smtp.us-west-2.amazonaws.com (for region us-west-2)
3. email-smtp.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com (for region eu-west-1)

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