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Michael Sage

IT, Digital & Culture

SES – SNS -Lamdba – Dynamodb – Alllll the AWS

I’ve been using SES for a while for sending email from servers.

A few months ago one of my servers was compromised and I discovered there is no such thing as good logging in SES…. whooops… Amazon suspended my account and this lead me to investigate how I could get some visibility of SES logging. This was considerably harder than I would have thought. There are no SMTP logs, not real recording of any information and no diagnostics. I nearly left SES for this, then I decided to use it as a learning opportunity to understand more about AWS & SES.

I used this guide to get it all working: https://blog.andreev.it/?p=5513

Hopefully this site never goes down, if so I will need to write my own guide! 

It’s easy to add extra fields to the database. These are all the objects available https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/notification-contents.html

Finally this docker image allows you to connect to dynamodb easily https://github.com/YoyaTeam/dynamodb-manager

The only thing I haven’t managed to do is find out which IAM user actually sent the email… I need to do more research on this to try and enhance my logging further.

AWS Logos for SES, SNS, Lamdba and Dynamodb