How to use AWS Simple Email Service (SES) from TypeScript on NodeJS example

In our application flows we use AWS Simple Email Service to send emails to our users. Since the documentation and examples of AWS SES are not that clear, it might take some trial and error to figure out which of the parameters are mandatory and, more important, obsolete. The AWS examples here crash if you actually configure the parameters with empty strings or null like mentioned there.

This TypeScript code below initiates a AWS SES connection and uses an earlied AWS CloudFront generated Email template (see example below somewhere). I found it quite surprising that you can actually refer to the template by name and not ARN only.

import * as AWS from 'aws-sdk';
import * as https from 'https';

const ses = new AWS.SES({
    httpOptions: {
        agent: new https.Agent({
            keepAlive: true
        })
    }
});

/**
 * Send email through AWS SES Templates
 */
export async function sendMail(email: string, name: string): Promise(String) {

    try {
        // Create SES sendTemplatedEmail templateData content
        const templatedata = {
            parameter_name: name
        };
        // console.debug(`sendMail templatedata: ${JSON.stringify(templatedata)}`);

        // Create SES sendTemplatedEmail full message
        const params = {
            Destination: {
                ToAddresses: [ email ]
            },
            Source: 'noreply@terra10.io',
            Template: 'myFanceTerra10EmailTemplate',
            TemplateData: JSON.stringify(templatedata)
        };
        // console.debug(`sendMail param: ${JSON.stringify(params)}`);

        const sesResponse = await ses.sendTemplatedEmail(params).promise();
        console.log(`sendMail requestId: ${sesResponse.$response.requestId} and messageId: ${sesResponse.MessageId}`);
        return 'OK';
    } catch (e) {
        console.error(`sendMail unexpected: ${e.message}`);
        return 'something fancy error handling';
    }
}

Here is an example AWS CloudFormation resource for the AWS SES email template. You can use the always handy sub function to prevent any complex character escaping or unreadable 1-line HTML. I love it for EC2 UserData and for stuff like this:

Resources:
  SesTemplateTerra10:
    Type: AWS::SES::Template
    Properties:
      Template:
        TemplateName: myFanceTerra10EmailTemplate
        SubjectPart: My Subject
#       TextPart: "Nobody uses this anymore right ???"
        HtmlPart:
          Fn::Sub: |
            <img src="https://ilionx.tmpldesign.nl/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/logo.png">
            <h1>Sir/Madam {{parameter_name}},</h1>
            <p>Ho ya doin ?</p>
            <p>cheerio,</p>
            <strong>the T10 crew</strong>

In case you use the Serverless Framework (you should) for Serverless deployments the following code is necessary in your Serverless.yaml. This allows your Lambda function to use the Email template on runtime. In our case the domain is hosted on AWS Route53 as well which saves you some problems.

- Effect: Allow
  Action:
  - ses:SendTemplatedEmail
  Resource:
  - "arn:aws:ses:eu-west-1:*:identity/terra10.io"

Hope it helps!

References

• Link to the original article due to RSS feeds @ https://jvzoggel.com
• Sending Email Using Amazon SES