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Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) and PHP

This morning Amazon announced availability of a bulk email delivery service called "Simple Email Service". Anyone who knows how much pain is it to set-up scalable email solution (and it is not just spammers who need it!) should celebrate the occasion. I know of a company that spent several years cleaning ip addresses it sends email and found itself locked into the contract with internet provider since it would take forever to reach required level of email deliver ability anywhere else.

Anyway, this evening I decided to check the Amazon claim that the service is "simple". Found out that it is indeed simple!
Since there is not much in terms of the documentation yet, here is my code where I used AWS PHP library:

// Enable full-blown error reporting. http://twitter.com/rasmus/status/7448448829
error_reporting(-1);

// Set plain text headers
header("Content-type: text/plain; charset=utf-8");

// Include the SDK
require_once '../sdk.class.php';


// Instantiate the Amazon class
$ses = new AmazonSES();

//what's our quota?
$rQuota = $ses->get_send_quota();
$quota24 = (int) $rQuota->body->GetSendQuotaResult->Max24HourSend;
$sentCnt = (int) $rQuota->body->GetSendQuotaResult->SentLast24Hours;
echo(
"we can send max of $quota24 per 24 hrs and we sent $sentCnt so far\n");

//verify sender email (do it once per sender!)
//$ses->verify_email_address('dispose@gmail.com');
//print_r($ses->list_verified_email_addresses());


//send email
$source = 'dispose@gmail.com';
$destination = CFComplexType::map(array('ToAddresses'=>'x@gmail.com', 'CcAddresses'=>'x@hotmail.com'));

$message = CFComplexType::map(array('Subject.Data'->'test email', 'Body.Text.Data'->'test message ' . rand(100, 1000)));
$rSendEmail = $ses->send_email($source, $destination, $message);

if (
$rSendEmail->status==200) {
$emailId = $rSendEmail->body->SendEmailResult->MessageId;
echo(
"sent test email with id: $emailId\n");
}
else {
print_r($rSendEmail);
}


Comments

Mark Pemburn said…
Great! This code did the trick for me! Two things need to be changed, however: 1) You need to pass the AWS Access Key and Secret Key into the AmazonSES object (can simply passed be in as arguments in the constructor or as the constants AWS_KEY and AWS_SECRET_KEY) and 2) There's a syntax error in the array passed to the CFComplexType::map -- those '->' need to be '=>'. Other than that, fantastic!
Degan Kettles said…
Thank you so much. This is my first use of any of the amazon services and this saved my bacon. I tried using the perl scripts and my godaddy server didn't have the right libraries installed and so I thought I was stuck. Anyway, it worked, woo hoo!
Anonymous said…
Very helpful!
If you want to send html emails, just change :

CFComplexType::map(array('Subject.Data'->'test email', 'Body.Text.Data'->'test message ' . rand(100, 1000)));

with this:

Body.Html.Data

Thanks Again!

J.
Killian said…
Is it possible to send HTML emails with this code?
Brendan said…
Is it possible to reference in a text file for the email content?
I want to add a lot of HTML code to my emails and various apostrophes, inverted commas, etc, may throw the embedded text emails off.
Unknown said…
Brendan,
My suggestion is two use two template files, one for HTML body of the email, and the other for plain text. In the code you can change addressee name and whatever other information you may have before sending it. And you do need to worry about inverted commas, UNICODE characters, or any escaping as library will take care of correct email encoding

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