I'm sure there are existing services that can do this, but we already used AWS, and it would keep the billing simple. Also, we had limited control of the format of the email, so only needed the subject line to be sent by SMS. It seemed clear that it wouldn't be hard to do in AWS - these notes show how to do it.
As this is not something I'm likely to do a lot, I'll use the AWS console - as this is far from static, the details here may change.
First - sort your SMS limit
By default, AWS has a limit of $1 / month spend on SMS - this is very nice of them, you don't accidentally want to spend a lot, but if you want to be able to start using it, contact support (top right n the console) and get that increased immediately. You can still specify a "soft limit" after they've increased your limit.Set up the SNS topic and subscribe your SMS
- Go to the Simple Notification Service
, Topics, Create new topic
.
Enter topic name and display name (the display name will appear in SMS messages) - Make a note of the topic ARN.
- Create subscription, Protocol SMS, Endpoint is your phone number (with international prefix, e.g. +44 in the UK)
- You will probably now receive some SMS messages about the fact that you're subscribed.
- You can also add an email subscription at the same time, as your SMS limit may be reached, and you still want to check it works.
Set up email reception
For myself, we already had a hosted zone set up in Route 53. If you don't have one, it may well be a good idea to set that up, I'm not covering that here. If you have a hosted zone (e.g. a subdomain of your normal domain), proceed from here, otherwise you can set up the MX record for a subdomain yourself elsewhere.- Go to Route 53, click on hosted zones, and select the zone for which you want to receive the email.
- Check if you already have an MX record set up (you can change the drop down from Any type to MX to show it).
- If not, Create Record Set
- Leave the name blank (unless you want to receive mail for a subdomain, e.g. if the main domain already has one)
- Change the Type to MX
- under value, enter something like:
10 inbound-smtp.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com
- the incoming smtp servers are listed in http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/regions.html
Processing incoming email
Now you need to set up a lambda function to handle incoming email. You can have incoming email go directly to SMS, but it will send everything including all headers, which is almost certainly not what you want.We will use a lambda function to process the email, sending notification of the subject to the SNS.
Before creating a Lambda function, first create an IAM role that you'll use. This is because the Lambda function needs permissions to use SNS.
Create an IAM role
- Go to IAM, click on roles
- Create new role
- Select role type, AWS Service role, AWS Lambda
- Skip the attach policies (i.e. click next step)
- Give the role a name (e.g. ses_to_sns)
- Create role
- Then find the role and edit it. Under Permissions, go to Inline Policies and create one.
- Custom Policy, give it a name, and add this in (this policy is much more open than you need it, but it should work)
{
"Version": "2012-10-17",
"Statement": [
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": [
"lambda:InvokeFunction"
],
"Resource": "arn:aws:lambda:*"
},
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": "logs:CreateLogGroup",
"Resource": "arn:aws:logs:*"
},
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": [
"logs:CreateLogStream",
"logs:PutLogEvents"
],
"Resource": [
"arn:aws:logs:*"
]
},
{
"Action": [
"sns:*"
],
"Resource": "*",
"Effect": "Allow"
},
{
"Action": [
"ses:*"
],
"Resource": "*",
"Effect": "Allow"
}
]
}
Create the lambda function
- Go to Lamda
- Create a Lambda function
- Blank function. Skip configure triggers (we'll do this from SES), click Next
- Give it a name, and copy this code into the function code (note, you have to use the correct TopicArn:
var AWS = require('aws-sdk');
AWS.config.region = 'eu-west-1';
exports.handler = function(event, context, callback) {
console.log('forward subject matcher');
var sesNotification = event.Records[0].ses;
console.log("SES Notification:\n", JSON.stringify(sesNotification, null, 2));
var sns = new AWS.SNS();
sns.publish({
Message: sesNotification.mail.commonHeaders.subject ,
TopicArn: 'arn:aws:sns:xxxxxwhatever'
}, function(err, data) {
if (err) {
console.log(err.stack);
return;
}
console.log('push sent');
console.log( sesNotification.mail.commonHeaders.subject);
context.done(null, 'Function Finished!');
});
};
Set up the email receiving rule set
- Go to SES
- Create rule
- Under recipient, specify the recipient you want to use in the subdomain you set up the MX record for (e.g. notifications@aws.example.com), and add, next
- Under "Add action", select Lambda and select the name of the lambda function you created above.
- Do NOT select an SNS topic (that's already done in the Lambda function itself)
- Give the rule a name and go through the rest of the process.
Test it all
That should be it - send an email to the address you configured - you should receive an SMS containing the display name of the SNS topic and the subject line of the email.Using it for alerts and notification
You will want to change some setting for the emails you are sending. To do this, go to the Simple Notification Service in the AWS console (SNS), and select Text Messaging (SMS) and Manage text messaging preferences.As this is for alert messages, you will want to change the message type to transactional (this is more expensive but higher priority), and the default sender ID (which shows up in the SMS). You can also choose to have reports saved to S3. Also set a reasonable account spend limit (not too low, you probably don't want it to silently fail, which is what will happen if you hit your limit).
Now all you need to do is set up your alerts to include this email, and subscribe anybody who needs to receive the alerts to the SNS topic.
And hope nothing ever goes wrong that you need to be alerted of.
