Amazon SES Email Integration

[sebastian-meckovski]

Why SES?

Primarily pricing. SES is ~$0.10/1,000 emails, which is significantly cheaper than SendGrid at higher volumes and they also include a generous free tier.

Implement it via app

Is there currently any way to intercept all outgoing Swell notifications and route them through a custom email provider via a custom app, without disabling the built-in notification system? Ideally I'd want to keep using the native functionality (automatic order confirmation, account registration, etc.) and just swap the delivery layer. From my current understanding, the only way to do this via a custom app would be to disable all default notifications and reimplement everything via app functions.

Effort as a native integration

Would this be a lot of effort to add it as an integtaion? My feeling is that it should be relatively straightforward — the SendGrid integration already handles the full email pipeline (template rendering, from/to, HTML body). The change would essentially be swapping @sendgrid/mail for @aws-sdk/client-ses and updating the credentials config (AWS Access Key ID + Secret instead of a SendGrid API key). All the notification logic, Liquid templating, and event triggers would remain untouched.

[dminch]

Hi, great question. You can actually use Amazon SES with Swell today by leveraging SES's SMTP interface. All native notification functionality continues to work as-is; only the delivery layer changes.
Setup steps:

PUT /settings/notifications
{
"transport": {
"type": "smtp",
"smtp_host": "email-smtp..amazonaws.com",
"smtp_port": 587,
"smtp_username": "",
"smtp_password": ""
}
}

As for the native connectivity over the API, I think we will consider this option. You are right, it is easy to add.
As for the app approach, unfortunately you can't hook into the email delivery layer with a custom app. it would require disabling all native notifications and reimplementing them, which we wouldn't recommend.

[sebastian-meckovski]

@dminch Thanks for the info.

I managed to successfully deliver a test email from Settings > Notifications > Email Template > Test Email > Send and I can see that it's signed by eu-north-1.amazonses.com so it's definately working

But when I try to send a "real" notification for example by creating an order, email does not get delivered, even though notification record is being created:

Any ideas why is this happening?

[sebastian-meckovski]

UPDATE:
I just received all the emails from previous testing after about ~4 hours

I'm guessing they were stuck somewhere in a queue?

[sebastian-meckovski]

Seems to be working fine now

[steven-k1]

@sebastian-meckovski The delay you experienced with notifications was most likely due to an infrastructure issue (details here) that occurred last Friday, which caused a temporary backlog in processing.