How to send emails using Amazon SES in Node.js

Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) is a popular cloud-based service for sending transactional and marketing emails. It integrates well with all popular programming languages.

In this tutorial, I shall explain how to use this email service for sending transactional (or even marketing) emails in an Express.js/Node.js project.

Want to integrate AWS SES in Spring Boot project? Follow this tutorial for step-by-step instructions.

AWS SES Setup

To use AWS SES in your project, you must have:

• An AWS account with full access to SES service (you need to create a support ticket to remove sandbox restrictions)
• A verified email address or domain name you want to use for sending emails

If you need help, follow these instructions to complete the setup.

👉 Try Amazon SES with EmailOctopus — A low-cost email marketing platform offering high deliverability, customized reports, and the ability to drip email sequences, import contacts, and integrate with forms.

Create a Node.js Project

Let us create a new Node.js project and install all the required dependencies. We will use the official AWS SDK for JavaScript to call SES email service API.

$ npm init -y
$ npm install express body-parser aws-sdk --save

The -y flag will skip the questionnaire and create a default package.json file project in the root directory.

Sending Emails using AWS SES API

Create a ses-client.js file in your project root directory with the following content:

ses-client.js

const AWS = require('aws-sdk');

const config = require('./config'); // load configurations file

AWS.config.update({
    accessKeyId: config.aws.key,
    secretAccessKey: config.aws.secret,
    region: config.aws.ses.region
});

const ses = new AWS.SES({apiVersion: '2010-12-01'});

const sendEmail = (to, subject, message, from) => {
    const params = {
        Destination: {
            ToAddresses: [to]
        },
        Message: {
            Body: {
                Html: {
                    Charset: 'UTF-8',
                    Data: message
                },
                /* replace the Html attribute with the following if you want to send plain text emails. 
                Text: {
                    Charset: "UTF-8",
                    Data: message
                }
             */
            },
            Subject: {
                Charset: 'UTF-8',
                Data: subject
            }
        },
        ReturnPath: from ? from : config.aws.ses.from.default,
        Source: from ? from : config.aws.ses.from.default,
    };

    ses.sendEmail(params, (err, data) => {
        if (err) {
            return console.log(err, err.stack);
        } else {
            console.log("Email sent.", data);
        }
    });
};

module.exports = {sendEmail};

In the above file, we have created a function called sendEmail that can be invoked from anywhere in the Node.js application to send an email via SES API.

Now create a config.js file in the root directory and specify the AWS access key, access secret, and other required information.

config.js

module.exports = {
    'aws': {
        'key': 'YOUR_ACCESS_KEY',
        'secret': 'YOUR_ACCESS_SECRET',
        'ses': {
            'from': {
                // replace with an actual email address
                'default': '"Example.com" <noreply@example.com>', 
            },
            // e.g. us-west-2
            'region': 'YOUR_ACCESS_REGION' 
        }
    }
};

Create server.js File

Let us create a server.js file in our project root directory that will be used to run our Node.js application:

server.js

const express = require('express');
const bodyParser = require('body-parser');
const app = express();

const sesClient = require('./ses-client');

app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: false }));  
app.use(bodyParser.json());

app.get('/', (req, res) => {
    // call sesClient to send an email
    sesClient.sendEmail('user@example.com', "Hey! Welcome", "This is the body of email");
    
    res.send('Email is sent!');
});

app.listen(3000, () => {
    console.log('App is listening on port 3000');
});

Source code: Download the complete source code from GitHub available under MIT license.

Run the Application

To execute the project, run the following command in the terminal:

$ npm run start

It will start the application server listening on port 3000 for connections. To test the solution, open the following URL in your browser window: http://localhost:3000. It is only a basic example to test the solution.

✌️ Like this article? Follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn. You can also subscribe to RSS Feed.