AWS SES Client Package

aws.ses is a simple client package for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Email Service (SES) API, which can be used to send email messages.

To use the package, you will need an AWS account and enter your credentials into R. Your keypair can be generated on the IAM Management Console under the heading Access Keys. Note that you only have access to your secret key once. After it is generated, you need to save it in a secure location. New keypairs can be generated at any time if yours has been lost, stolen, or forgotten.

By default, all cloudyr packages look for the access key ID and secret access key in environment variables. You can also use this to specify a default region or a temporary "session token". For example:

Sys.setenv("AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID" = "mykey",
           "AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY" = "mysecretkey",
           "AWS_DEFAULT_REGION" = "us-east-1",
           "AWS_SESSION_TOKEN" = "mytoken")

These can alternatively be set on the command line prior to starting R or via an Renviron.site or .Renviron file, which are used to set environment variables in R during startup (see ? Startup).

If you work with multiple AWS accounts, another option that is consistent with other Amazon SDKs is to create a centralized ~/.aws/credentials file, containing credentials for multiple accounts. You can then use credentials from this file on-the-fly by simply doing:

# use your 'default' account credentials
aws.signature::use_credentials()

# use an alternative credentials profile
aws.signature::use_credentials(profile = "bob")

Temporary session tokens are stored in environment variable AWS_SESSION_TOKEN (and will be stored there by the use_credentials() function). The aws.iam package provides an R interface to IAM roles and the generation of temporary session tokens via the security token service (STS).

Code Examples

The package does not yet support all SES functionality, but does provide the basic mechanisms for verifying a sender email address (i.e., your email) and sending messages once that sender address has been verified.

# setup/verify email address
verify_identity("me@example.com")

# check verification status
get_verification_attrs("me@example.com")

# send an email
## simple plain-text email
send_email("Test Email Body", subject = "Test Email", 
           from = "me@example.com", to = "recipient@example.com")

# html and plain text versions
send_email(message = "Plain text body", html = "<div><p style='font-weight=bold;'>HTML text body</p></div>", 
           subject = "Test Email", 
           from = "me@example.com", to = "recipient@example.com")

Messages can be sent to up to 50 recipients, using any combination of To, CC, and BCC forms.

Installation

This package is not yet on CRAN. To install the latest development version you can install from the cloudyr drat repository:

# latest stable version
install.packages("aws.ses", repos = c(cloudyr = "http://cloudyr.github.io/drat", getOption("repos")))

Or, to pull a potentially unstable version directly from GitHub:

if (!require("ghit")) {
    install.packages("ghit")
}
ghit::install_github("cloudyr/aws.ses")