Searching and retrieving email content sent via Amazon SES

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is a highly scalable email sending service provided by AWS, enabling businesses and developers to send marketing, notification, and transactional emails in a cost-effective manner. As a reliable cloud-based email platform, SES not only offers powerful delivery capabilities but also comes equipped with comprehensive tracking and monitoring features to help users ensure successful delivery and analyze sending effectiveness.

However, in daily operations, we often need to review previously sent email content, whether for audit purposes, troubleshooting, or evaluating email template effectiveness. Many SES users face a common challenge: how to conveniently view and retrieve all historical emails sent through SES and their content?

By default, AWS SES does not automatically store the content of emails you send. Fortunately, with proper configuration of Amazon SES, we can easily achieve this requirement by establishing a complete archiving system for all outgoing emails.

In this article, I will detail how to set up and configure SES Configuration Set and Email Archiving to record all sent email content to a designated storage location, allowing you to view and retrieve historical emails at any time. Whether you need to conduct compliance audits, resolve customer inquiries, or analyze email effectiveness, this solution will provide valuable support.

Let's begin exploring how to leverage AWS's powerful features to build a complete email history tracking system.

Step 1: Create Email Archive Open the Amazon SES service panel, select Mail Manager, and select Email archiving. In the Manage archives menu, choose Create archive. Enter an archive name - it's recommended to create separate archive names for different domains or sending email addresses based on your retrieval needs, and select a retention period according to your business requirements for easy management and use. If you have encryption requirements for static data, you can choose to create and use a KMS key.

Step 2: Create Configuration Set Select Configuration from the left side of the Amazon SES service panel, choose Configuration sets, and click Create set. On the opened page, set the configuration set name. For easier management and querying, it's recommended to create separate configuration sets for different domains or sending email addresses. Be sure to enable the Archive option and select the email archive created in Step 1, then create the configuration set. Configure other options on the page according to your business needs.

Step 3: Associate Configuration Set when Creating Identity Select Configuration from the left side of the Amazon SES service panel, then select Identity.

• If you haven't created an identity yet, click Create identity. On the configuration page, check Assign a default configuration set and create the identity.

• If you have already created an identity, select the identity for which you want to enable email archiving, locate Configuration set on the page, click Edit, check Assign a default configuration set, and save.

With this, the configuration is complete. Next, perform verification by sending an email using Python code with SMTP (refer to official documentation for SMTP configuration), or send a test email through the management console. Python example code is as follows:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import smtplib
from email.mime.text import MIMEText
from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart

# SES SMTP Configuration
SMTP_SERVER = "email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com"
SMTP_PORT = 587
SMTP_USERNAME = "YOUR_SMTP_USERNAME"
SMTP_PASSWORD = "YOUR_SMTP_PASSWORD"

# Email Setting
sender = "sender@yourdomain.com"
recipient = "recipient@example.com"
subject = "Test Email from SES SMTP"
body = "This is a test email sent using SES SMTP interface. Test the archive feature"

# Create Email
message = MIMEMultipart()
message["From"] = sender
message["To"] = recipient
message["Subject"] = subject
message.attach(MIMEText(body, "plain"))

# Send Email
try:
    server = smtplib.SMTP(SMTP_SERVER, SMTP_PORT)
    server.ehlo()
    server.starttls()
    server.ehlo()
    server.login(SMTP_USERNAME, SMTP_PASSWORD)
    server.sendmail(sender, recipient, message.as_string())
    server.close()
    print("Email sent successfully!")
except Exception as e:
    print(f"Failed to send email: {e}")

After the email is sent, you can find the corresponding archive in Mail Manager, Email Archiving, Search archive to query and retrieve it. You can view detailed information about the email message, such as message ID, receive date, sender, recipient, email text, etc.

Through this configuration guide, you have now successfully set up a complete email content tracking system, achieving effective storage and retrieval of all historical emails. The Amazon SES service not only meets the need to view past email content but also brings more value to your email communication management.

After implementing this configuration, you will gain the following benefits:

• Complete email history records, supporting compliance audits and troubleshooting
• Flexible retrieval mechanisms for quickly locating specific email content
• In-depth data analysis possibilities to understand email effectiveness and trends
• Improved customer service capability through quick access to historical communication records It's worth noting that as your business develops, you may need to adjust your storage strategy based on email volume and retention requirements, such as implementing lifecycle management rules or considering migrating data to cold storage to optimize costs.

If you have any questions about AWS SES or email tracking, please feel free to leave a comment in the discussion section. Thank you for reading!