Using Amazon SES to send emails from NetBox

[llamafilm]

NetBox version

v3.7.0

Feature type

New functionality

Proposed functionality

In addition to SMTP, offer a way to send emails using Amazon SES.

Example code available here: https://github.com/awsdocs/aws-doc-sdk-examples/blob/main/python/example_code/ses/ses_email.py#L66

Use case

My organization strongly prefers SES APIs over SMTP. This allows you to authenticate by EC2 instance role, without creating any passwords.

Database changes

maybe a new field to store email method preference

External dependencies

https://pypi.org/project/boto3/

[markkuleinio]

Just an idea, how I do it:

• I run postfix on the NetBox EC2 instance, listening only on localhost, configured to send everything via SES
• I configure NetBox to use localhost for SMTP email (duh just realized that your problem is using SMTP in general, not just using SES SMTP in NetBox configuration, leaving this here anyway...)

[llamafilm]

Thanks for the relay idea. That got me thinking, maybe I could set it up with this: https://github.com/loopingz/smtp-relay

[jeffgdotorg]

Thanks for your interest in helping improve NetBox!

We've reviewed your issue and would like to get more details to help understand it in depth. Please revise the original report to address the following:

1. In use case, identify the problem you're trying to solve – you've stated a preference around how emails should be sent, but provided no context around why you're sending emails from NetBox.
2. In external dependencies, please explain what role you think the boto3 library might play in the solution.

[llamafilm]

To be honest, I'm pretty new at Netbox and don't know exactly what email is used for here. I read it can be used to alert on critical events but I haven't been able to test this yet. Perhaps there's a better solution, maybe webhooks?

boto3 is Amazon's Python library which is used to authenticate and send SES email.

[candlerb]

The only case I've come across so far where Netbox sends E-mails is if an exception is raised in the web interface, in which case the exception backtrace is mailed to the configured ADMINS addresses.

[jeffgdotorg]

Thanks for the candor, @llamafilm. I'm still getting my NetBox legs too. And I learned something today – I've used boto3 before to wrangle S3 objects but never looked at the other services it supports.

I think there's value in continuing this conversation, so I'm going to convert this issue to a discussion and generalize the subject a little bit. Maybe it will come back around to a more fully-formed feature request down the road.