If you use Amazon SES to receive email, it’s probably not the kind of email that you want to end up in someone’s personal inbox to be manually read using a traditional email client. The most common use case for receiving mail in SES is to handle it automatically. Emails like contact@example.com or unsubscribe@example.com fall in this category. This article describes how to set up SES to receive email & process it automatically.

Step 1 — Create a Rule Set

Start by creating a rule set as shown below:

You can also create an S3 bucket from the above screen, which will also add a bucket policy to that bucket to allow SES to write to it. But if you select an existing bucket, remember to add a bucket policy to it to allow writes from SES.

The idea here is to first write all incoming emails to S3, then run a Lambda function to fetch those emails from S3 & process them.

Step 2 — Create the Lambda Function

Next, create the Lambda function to fetch the email from S3 & process it as needed. Here’s a sample:

var AWS = require('aws-sdk');
var S3 = new AWS.S3();
exports.handler = function (event, context, callback) {
    S3.getObject({
        Bucket: 'my-bucket',
        Key: event.Records[0].ses.mail.messageId
    }, function (err, data) {
        if (err) callback(err);
        else {
            // process email (data.Body) here
            callback(null, null);
        }
    });
};

About the Author ✍🏻

Harish KM is a Principal DevOps Engineer at QloudX. 👨🏻‍💻

With over a decade of industry experience as everything from a full-stack engineer to a cloud architect, Harish has built many world-class solutions for clients around the world! 👷🏻‍♂️

With over 20 certifications in cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP), containers (Kubernetes, Docker) & DevOps (Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins), Harish is an expert in a multitude of technologies. 📚

These days, his focus is on the fascinating world of DevOps & how it can transform the way we do things! 🚀

Lambda SES