AwsSesNewsletters¶ ↑

This project rocks and uses MIT-LICENSE.

What is AwsSesNewsletters¶ ↑

AwsSesNewsletters is a Rails plugin or, using the new nomenclature a gemified plugin, that allows you to very easily construct newsletters that are going to be sent with Amazon SES. In other words, it is a wrapper over aws-ses that provides some basic functionality to construct the emails and a common workflow to send the emails.

Dependencies¶ ↑

How to install¶ ↑

Install the gem, either as¶ ↑

gem install aws_ses_newsletters

or adding

gem 'aws_ses_newsletters' to your Gemfile and running bundle install

Install the needed migrations, to generate the table for Newsletters & Emails Responses¶ ↑

rake aws_ses_newsletters:install:migrations

This will add 2 migration, that you need to run:

rake db:migrate

Mount the engine in the path of your preference. In routes.rb¶ ↑

mount AwsSesNewsletters::Engine, at: "/newsletters"

This will add 2 new routes to your application:

POST newsletters/email_responses/bounce
POST newsletters/email_responses/complaint

These are the routes you need to configure in SNS to receive notifications for bounces and complaints respectively.

Add your amazon keys¶ ↑

SES_ACCESS_KEY_ID
SES_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY

In heroku, you need to set them as:

heroku config:set SES_ACCESS_KEY_ID=<you_access_keid> heroku config:set SES_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=<you_secret_access_key>

Usage¶ ↑

To create a Newsletter, you need to inherit from AwsSesNewsletters::NewslettersSender and implement 2 methods:

create_newsletter: which should create & return a AwsSesNewsletters::Newsletter
get_recipients: which should iterate over your recipients and yield with them. For example:

# def get_recipients # recipient = Recipient.new(‘fzuppa@10pines.com’, ‘Federico’, ‘Zuppa’) # yield recipient # end

After creating this class, you will usually execute it asynchronously using sidekiq:

YourClass.perform_async

To test it in the rails console, of course that you can do YourClass.new.perform

A few important use cases¶ ↑

There is a demo project that shows the most important use cases I had inmind when building this plugin: github.com/10Pines/aws_ses_newsletters_demo

Here’s a quick explanation of them:

Create the html using ERB¶ ↑

There is a helper class to do this called AwsSesNewsletters::HtmlBuilder. It takes 2 parameters

The template erb that will be used to construct the html
A hash with variables needed to construct the html

For example, take a look at NewslettersWithVariableReplacementsSender in the demo:

html_body: AwsSesNewsletters::HtmlBuilder.new(
    "#{::Rails.root}/app/views/newsletter_with_instance_variables.html.erb",
    {promotions: [OpenStruct.new(name: '10% off this week')]}
).build

Replace strings after the html is built¶ ↑

You need to do this to put the recipient’s email for each mail or an unsubscription token (those were the 2 things I needed)

If you want to perform such replacement, just override do_custom_replacements_for(email, recipient)

For example:

def do_custom_replacements_for(mail, recipient)
    mail.html_part.body = mail.html_part.body.raw_source.gsub('recipient_email', recipient.email)
end

Send inline attachments¶ ↑

This is discouraged. I found out after building the gem and that is why I left it (in case you need it)

To do such thing, simply override get_images returning a hash of images.

def get_images
  images = {}
  images["logo10pines"] = File.read(Rails.root.join('public/mailresources/logo-fullcolor_150px.png'))
  images
end

In the html, simply put the id that you used in the hash.

<img src="logo10pines" %>

Please look at the demo example that it will be much easier to understand!

Author: Federico Zuppa¶ ↑

fzuppa@10pines.com