Amazon Simple Email Server

We use Amazon’s Simple Email Server to send outgoing emails from the Digital Collections.

The IAM identity we use to send email is:

ses-smtp-user.20200807-125501.

To get SMTP username and password, you use an AWS IAM credentials, but need to derive the password from the IAM secret key: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/smtp-credentials.html#smtp-credentials-convert (ruby code: Convert AWS IAM credentials to AWS SMTP credentials )

(There may be another way to get them from SES console… for some reason accessing AWS SES console it makes us set up from scratch including verifying our domain, when in fact SES is already working for us…. not sure what’s going on here).

Settings in scihist_digicoll code

app/lib/scihist_digicoll/env.rb and config/environments/production.rb add the settings to the settings. To view them in the console, try:

Rails.application.config.action_mailer.smtp_settings
{:address=>"email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com",
:port=>587,
:user_name=>"joe",
:password=>"schmo",
:authentication=>:login,
:enable_starttls_auto=>true}

Sending a test email from the console

ActionMailer::Base.mail(from: 'no-reply@sciencehistory.org', to: 'erubeiz@sciencehistory.org', subject: 'Test message from Eddie. Please ignore.', content_type: 'text/html', body: 'Testing').deliver_now

DKIM

We started using DKIM to prove our ownership of the sciencehistory.org email domain in March 2024.

See settings in AWS .

See settings in Terraform.