Replace traditional email mailbox polling with real-time reads using Amazon SES and Lambda

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Integrating emails into an automated workflow for automated processing can be challenging. Traditionally, applications have had to use the POP protocol to connect to mail servers and poll for emails to arrive in a mailbox and then process the messages inline and perform actions on the message. This can be an inefficient mechanism and prone to errors that result in the workflow missing messages. Since this method requires polling it’s not great if you need real-time processing of messages and introduces inefficiencies in the design. By Syed Ali Abbas Gardezi and Satish Natarajan.

This blog post shows how to use SES to perform automated processing of email in an application workflow. I will use the option in SES to save received emails in S3 and trigger a Lambda function to process the message without having to poll a mailbox. This sample application demo is using email to receive simple orders which get automatically processed and the details stored in DynamoDB.

The article goes over:

  • Create an S3 Bucket for Email Storage
  • Create DynamoDB Table to Simulate Application
  • Create Lambda Function triggered by SES to Process Email
  • Configure SES to Send Emails to S3 and Trigger Lambda Function

In this post, we have shown you how to integrate email processing into an application workflow without having to resort to polling a mail box. Good read!

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Tags cloud aws software-architecture serverless