Amazon’s Simple Email Service (SES) is a great solution for any project which requires bulk emails. the primary advantage of SES is cost, at $0.10 per 1000 emails sent it is between 5-10x cheaper than other alternatives such as SendGrid. There is a downside to the SES service, however and it is that it currently doesn’t provide an SMTP wrapper so whilst SendGrid and others allow you to simple change your SMTP settings, with SES you will have to do a bit more work.
Amazon (AWS) provides a very useful .NET SDK (complete with dll’s for .NET 2.0, 3.5 and 4.0) which you can simply copy into your project and start calling the Amazon functions from a .NET app such as an ASP.NET site. You can download the SDK here.
The below code shows a simple example of how to use the Amazon AWS SDK in .NET to send emails.
Dim listColl As New System.Collections.Generic.List(Of String)
'//TODO - Write a simple loop to add the recipents email addresses to the listColl object.
Dim client As New Amazon.SimpleEmail.AmazonSimpleEmailServiceClient("aws_public_key_here", "aws_private_key_here")
Dim mailObj As New SendEmailRequest
Dim destinationObj As New Destination(listColl)
mailObj.Source = "from@youremail.com" '//The from email address
mailObj.ReturnPath = "bounce@youremail.com" '//The email address for bounces
mailObj.Destination = destinationObj
'//Create Message
Dim emailSubjectObj As New Amazon.SimpleEmail.Model.Content("This is the Subject")
Dim emailBodyContentObj As New Amazon.SimpleEmail.Model.Content("This is the Body<br /><em>In Html</em>")
Dim emailBodyObj As New Amazon.SimpleEmail.Model.Body()
emailBodyObj.Html = emailBodyContentObj
Dim emailMessageObj As New Message(emailSubjectObj, emailBodyObj)
mailObj.Message = emailMessageObj
Dim response = client.SendEmail(mailObj)
That’s it, there’s really not a lot of heavy lifting to get starting using SES with .NET. the only thing I didn’t show in the code above is the loop for adding email addresses as strings to the generic collection, this loop will vary a lot depending on your exact requirements.
One thing to note above is that you will need to import the namespace Amazon.SimpleEmail.Model
AWS SES is not as full featured as a lot of solutions such as SendGrid, however it does have several useful features out-of-the-box such as the ability to perform email validation:
Dim testEmail As String = "anemail@domain.com" Dim verRequest As New VerifyEmailAddressRequest() verRequest.EmailAddress = testEmail client.VerifyEmailAddress(verRequest)
This should get you going with SES, I will update this page once the service develops.
