lambda-send-mail

Send emails from a website contact form using AWS Lambda.

Prerequisites

Serverless CLI

You will need serverless to deploy this code to AWS Lambda. Install serverless CLI from npm:

npm install -g serverless

You can update an existing installation by running:

npm update -g serverless

You might need an administator's account (sudo) to run these commands.

AWS account with access to Lambda

You will need an active AWS account with programmatic access to AWS Lambdas. Sign-up for an AWS account if you do not already have one.

Set up AWS credentials

Configure serverless with your AWS access key and secret:

serverless config credentials --provider aws --key <your-aws-key> --secret <your-aws-secret>

Create and AIM user and generate temporary access keys

For one-off deployment you can use the credentials you've just provided. You can always revoke the assess key afterwards. Alternatively, create an AIM user and generate temporary access keys as described in the serverless tutorial.

Put your secrets in a file

To keep your secrets safe put them in secrets.json file. Be careful not to add this file to your repo. If you accidentally did, watch this Miguel Grinberg's talk. Your secrets.json should look like this:

{
  "NODE_ENV": "production",
  "EMAIL": "<your-email-address>",
  "DOMAIN": "https://romankosobrodov.github.io/",
  "REDIRECT_URL": "https://romankosobrodov.github.io/thanks"
}

The EMAIL is the email address to which you are going to send messages from the website. The DOMAIN field is used to deny access to the Lambda function from other domains. And the REDIRECT_URL is the URL of the page on your website that you are going to display to the user after they submitted the contact form.

Deploy your Lambda

Deploy the function to AWS Lambda:

serverless deploy --stage production --region <your-region>

The Lambdas are deployed in a specified region, for example ap-southeast-2 for Asia-Pacific (Sydney).

If everything goes as planned and your AWS user has sufficient priviliges to set up lambda functions and configure CloudFormation you will see something like this:

...
endpoints:
  POST - https://<unique-id>.execute-api.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/production/email/send
functions:
  send: lambda-send-mail-production-send

Now you can copy the URL into your contact form, deploy it to the domain that you specified in the settings and try sending yourself a test email.

Verifying Your Email with AWS SES

If your email address and/or domain has not been verified yet with AWS SES, your lambda function will return the following error:

"Email address is not verified. The following identities failed the check in region AP-SOUTHEAST-2: <email@example.com>"

You will need to verify your email address following the instructions here. The process is quick, mine took about 5 minutes. Remember that verification is tied to your region, so you might need to repeat it if you deploy in multiple regions.