Using Amazon SES with Rails ActionMailer

Question

What would be the best way to go about making ActionMailer send mail via Amazon SES in Rails 3?

Edit:

This is now a gem:

gem install amazon-ses-mailer

https://rubygems.org/gems/amazon-ses-mailer

https://github.com/abronte/Amazon-SES-Mailer

Answer 1

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 openssl
   rvm 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

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

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)

StackOverFlow | Amazon-getting-started-send-using-smtp

Answer 4

After poking around a bit I ended up just making a simple class to do this.

https://github.com/abronte/Amazon-SES-Mailer

In rails, you can get the encoded email message:

m = UserMailer.welcome.encoded
AmazonSES.new.deliver(m)

Answer 5

I use the following gem:

https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-rails

It pulls in the standard aws-sdk, plus allows to set ActionMailer to use AWS SES. Example:

# config/production.rb
# ...
config.action_mailer.delivery_method     = :aws_sdk

Answer 6

Configuring your Rails application with Amazon SES

set action_mailer.perform_deliveries to true as it is set to false by default in the development/production environment

config.action_mailer.perform_deliveries = true

then paste this code in your development/production environment

config.action_mailer.smtp_settings = {
  :address => ENV["SES_SMTP_ADDRESS"],
  :port => 587,
  :user_name => ENV["SES_SMTP_USERNAME"], 
  :password => ENV["SES_SMTP_PASSWORD"],
  :authentication => :login,
  :enable_starttls_auto => true
}

Answer 7

I created a simple Rails / SES API gem that uses Signature v4 to sign the request. This is best used for transactional emails such as contact us, user registration, etc.

Rails SES API integration gem

Please feel free to improve on it & contribute.

Answer 8

using :sendmail, I managed to get all emails to send running apt-get install postfix as root on my AWS machine and using all the default answers.

Answer 9

SES just was released into beta today, so I doubt that there is a ready-to-go gem (at least, not that I've seen). You could write a custom module based upon their developer documents:

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/

Answer 10

You can provide delivery method to action mailer in your environment.

config.action_mailer.delivery_method = AmazonSES.deliver

For now you are likely on your own writing the delivery code.