AWS SES PHP SDK Problem

When you run it locally, you have a different environment than when it runs via your web browser and your web server. Make sure you have your AWS credentials properly available to your script. You also should be able to look in your server error logs to see details of what's causing the error. Finally, you can surround the call to sendEmail([...]) with a try { sendEmail([...]); } catch (Exception $e) { echo "<pre>"; print_r($e); echo "</pre>"; } to see if that catches the error and displays what's going on.

For our purposes, we have the AWS credentials in a text file on the server in a non-public path that the script can access and then we use the CredentialProvider to ... provide the credentials. ;)

use Aws\Credentials\CredentialProvider;
use Aws\Ses\SesClient;

$provider = CredentialProvider::ini('default', '/path/to/credentials.file');
$provider = CredentialProvider::memoize($provider);

$sesClient = SesClient::factory([
  'region' => 'us-east-1',
  'version' => 'latest',
  'credentials' => $provider,
]);