Sending emails from your application using Amazon Simple Email Service`
By Vaibhav Gadodia (11) on May 9th, 2011

Amazon Web ServicesAt Nagarro, we are big fans of Amazon (even with all it’s fallibilities), and when Amazon launched SES, we couldn’t be happier. SES stands for Simple Email Service. It is a scalable and reliable mechanism for sending mass email at very low prices. We often have the need to send email through applications that we develop (for notifications mainly), and we normally end up using a client supplied email ID which may be running through their mail server, or is provided by their email service provider. However, this has its own set of limitations – reliability is one, and cost is another (with higher reliability options costing a whole lot more).

So, with Amazon’s launching of SES, we now have another option that we can suggest to our customers whose needs include sending large number of emails from their application in a scalable and reliable manner. Here are couple of highlights about the service:

  • Pricing: $0.10 per 1000 email messages sent. Data transfer rates are $0.10 per GB incoming, and $0.15 and lower per GB for outgoing.
  • Email sending statistics are automatically collected (how many bounces, complaints, rejects, etc.)

First time users get 2000 mails per month free along with some free data transfer per month. This makes it perfect for a service that you can try out up front, and as your needs grow, you pay as per your usage. We couldn’t wait to try it out, so we incorporated it in an internal application. Below is the basic code that we used to send emails using Amazon SES from our .Net application.

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Use the features of the .Net framework to implement good coding patterns
By Ramesh Soni (1) on April 29th, 2009

In our haste to finish the coding of a given application, we often overlook great little techniques which can be deployed to ensure best practices in code. And since one of the best ways to learn is by example, we will walk through a very common block of code that is found in almost all Windows based applications – the block which shows and hides a wait cursor when a time consuming task is being executed by the application. Continued »