How can I build an application hosted on Amazon EC2 and send emails using Amazon SES through it?

Question

Hello everyone, I've just started exploring the vast suite of AWS and I am a bit stuck on how should to build an application hosted on Amazon EC2, which sends email to an address using Amazon SES...

Currently I am using the AWS JavaScript SDK to send emails - I read on the SES pricing page that I'll be paying $0.10 for every 1000 emails I send using "an email client or other software package", which I guess includes the AWS SDK as well; just above that it says "62,000 emails for free each month" when I send emails using an application hosted on Amazon EC2 - the offer's really good for me, so I want to learn how to setup an application hosted on Amazon EC2, and how to program it to send an email to a particular email using SES...

I tried finding some articles/tutorials on the same, but failed to find something helpful - if you can advise me on how I should start, that'd help me a lot :) Thanks!

Answer

You have two possibilities:

1) Use the SES AWS API for sending. Either with the SDK client in the language of your app or using the AWS CLI `aws ses send-email` 
2) just configure your EC2 instance to relay mails to SES and send the mails to localhost via `relayhost` in postfix for example

```
relayhost = [email-smtp.us-west-1.amazonaws.com]:587
```

There's good documentation on this at https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/postfix.html

How can I build an application hosted on Amazon EC2 and send emails using Amazon SES through it?

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