How to Use the Cloud to Send Emails

Requirements for sending emails from a production system differ from your development setup as you don't want to be limited in the number of emails, the sending rate or the sender address. Thus, using Gmail or similar services is not an option. If setting up and maintaining your own reliable mail server causes you a headache there's a simple solution: Leverage the cloud to send your emails.

This article shows how easy it is to integrate Amazon's Simple Email Service (SES) into Symfony.

In the Symfony configuration, change the Swift Mailer settings transport, host, port and encryption according to the information provided in the SES console. Create your individual SMTP credentials in the SES console and complete the configuration with the provided username and password:

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# app/config/config.yml
swiftmailer:
    transport:  smtp
    host:       email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
    port:       587 # different ports are available, see SES console
    encryption: tls # TLS encryption is required
    username:   AWS_SES_SMTP_USERNAME  # to be created in the SES console
    password:   AWS_SES_SMTP_PASSWORD  # to be created in the SES console

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<!-- app/config/config.xml -->
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<container xmlns="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xmlns:swiftmailer="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/swiftmailer"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services
        http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services/services-1.0.xsd
        http://symfony.com/schema/dic/swiftmailer
        http://symfony.com/schema/dic/swiftmailer/swiftmailer-1.0.xsd">

    <!-- ... -->
    <swiftmailer:config
        transport="smtp"
        host="email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com"
        port="587"
        encryption="tls"
        username="AWS_SES_SMTP_USERNAME"
        password="AWS_SES_SMTP_PASSWORD"
    />
</container>

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// app/config/config.php
$container->loadFromExtension('swiftmailer', array(
    'transport'  => 'smtp',
    'host'       => 'email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com',
    'port'       => 587,
    'encryption' => 'tls',
    'username'   => 'AWS_SES_SMTP_USERNAME',
    'password'   => 'AWS_SES_SMTP_PASSWORD',
));

The port and encryption keys are not present in the Symfony Standard Edition configuration by default, but you can simply add them as needed.

And that's it, you're ready to start sending emails through the cloud!

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# app/config/parameters.yml
parameters:
    # ...
    mailer_transport:  smtp
    mailer_host:       email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
    mailer_port:       587 # different ports are available, see SES console
    mailer_encryption: tls # TLS encryption is required
    mailer_user:       AWS_SES_SMTP_USERNAME # to be created in the SES console
    mailer_password:   AWS_SES_SMTP_PASSWORD # to be created in the SES console