AWS SES Production Access setup with Meteor

Question

Setting up Meteor to use "out of the box" AWS SES is simple, and one can use native Meteor "Email" methods without modification.

Steps to implement this can be found here. Thanks to Brian Shamblen for putting together a detailed answer.

But one caveat with the "out of the box" SES is you need to both verify the sender and receiver email address.

To remedy this, you can put in a request with AWS SES for what they call, Production Access.

And further, according to Brian Shamblen,

The process to get production access is rather complicated. One will need to handle bounce and complaint notifications from SES and prevent messages from being sent to those addresses in the future.

Question

What is the Meteor code involved in handling bounce and complaint notifications from SES and prevent messages from being sent to those addresses in the future?

EDIT: Made modifications to question for clarity.

Nonconductor

Do you have production access? The package you mentioned has issues must be working then, you just require this access and pre-approval of the sender email address from AWS or the email domain has to be verified by them with dns proof. – Evidential

What I was looking for was Meteor code to handle bounce and complaint notifications from SES and prevent messages from being sent to those addresses in the future... I wasn't clear, sorry. – Nonconductor

Answer 1

Requesting production access is fairly straightforward. You just need to contact them and they usually give it to you in a couple of hours.

Information about the process is here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/request-production-access.html

Load up the URL : http://aws.amazon.com/ses/fullaccessrequest/ and let them know what you will be sending via Emails, for example if you will be sending transaction based email (verification of a transaction, etc)

With production access you can either send email from:

• A specific verified email address, where you will be asked to click a link to an email sent to that address to verify you own it

• Any email under an entire domain. Under this process you prove you own the domain by editing its DNS records to contain a 'key'.

Most use cases are covered under production access, they typically give you 2000 emails a day and rate limit emails to 5/sec (they queue them so the maximum send rate is 5/sec). If you need more than this you can contact them to raise this additionally.

The process of verification is to stop people quickly creating AWS accounts to mass-spam users. If they allowed this straight-off then AWS IPs would be looked at as spam by other email providers.

For bounce notifications, SES tracks these, and you have to make sure that you don't get an above average bounce rate. Typically these would come from sending unsolicited email, which I wouldn't advise sending via SES.

Evidential

Right, I'm only going to be sending emails to my customers that sign up, and only then to once to verify their email address and for them to add their password to their account. What I thought I needed was code to handle bounce backs -- and that's what I was looking for here. – Nonconductor

@Nonconductor you don't need any code, as I mentioned its a fairly simple process it just means you have to track it, i.e sending emails from a monitored email address that the bounces can go to, since you have to verify the email this is not an issue. Your emails are transactional so they're not unsolicited – Evidential

great so from Brian's comment [in my question], I thought it was a more complex process is all... I'll give you the answer. – Nonconductor

Answer 2

Production access is only approved by the AWS team. Wait a bit and they should easily give you 2.000 emails/day for free. As per bounces-unsubscribes... You'll need to have the SES API notify you of each email address which has been 'marked' with such status. You should store all those email addresses somewhere and tell your app not to send them ANYTHING else in the future.

Audition

Can you give Meteor code examples of using the SES API in a case like this? How are you accessing the API, for example with a Meteor package? – Nonconductor

@Audition this is ridiculous, the answer is fairly straight forward and I don't think its a secret or something that needs to be on email, This is stackoverflow and the idea of answers here is that we all get help from them. – Evidential

@Akshat I wanted to really stick to the question, so that is my answer. He's asking extra info which is out of the scope of the question, that's the reason for the private contact. – Audition

@Audition I absolutely asked for code and the "how" to do it in my question and my comments to your "answer" are in line with the question for sure. So this comment of extra info outside of the question is just not accurate in my opinion. – Nonconductor