cl-ses: Send Email from Common Lisp with AWS's SES
I've been enjoying using Common Lisp lately. After going through the first half of Practical Common Lisp (highly recommended), I wanted to write some scripts to automate some of my own tasks. We use AWS for most of our infrastraucture at SimplyRETS and Reichert Brothers, and run jobs to check how our API's are holding up. Naturally, I wanted to automate some of that and send out an email when reports are generated.
In case you don't want to read the rest: cl-ses
Options
There are a few AWS libraries out there for Common Lisp1, but I couldn't find one that supported SES - expcept for aws-ses. The problem I had with aws-ses is that it only works with LispWorks - which is perfectly fine, but I've been using SBCL and wanted something with a bit more flexibility.
One a side note, if you are using LispWorks - aws-ses is really cool since the author wrote his own hmac, sha1, and base64 algorithms with 0 dependencies.
CL-SES
The app I wanted to send email from was running in SBCL - so I decided a port of aws-ses would be the right thing to do.
I put up cl-ses on GithHub the other day after porting all of the
LispWorks specific function. Specifically, the use of comm for the
tcp connection was the major blocker. I decided against porting
comm to sb-bsd-ports and opted for bringing in Drakma, which is an
awesome HTTP Library that has already hashed out the differences
between Lisp implementations.
Losing the "no dependency" badge and adding the "1 dependency, but multiple implementations" badge was the best route - especially since there seems to be a lack of any high level email libraries.
Usage
I changed up a bit of code in order to get the signing algorthims to
work with Drakma's headers, but the library stayed very simple - only
exposing one send-email function. Here's all it takes to send an
email:
(cl-ses:send-email :from "me@example.com" :to "you@example.com" :subject "Hello from CL-SES" :message "The body of the email message" :aws-access-key "XXXXXX" :aws-secret-key "XXXXXXXXXXX")
send-email returns T if the status was 200 (OK), and NIL
otherwise. In the future I'll hopefully have implemented better
error reporting.
You can easily send to multiple recipients:
(cl-ses:send-email :from "me@example.com" :to "first@example.com,second@example.com,third@example.com" :subject "Hello from CL-SES" :message "The body of the email message" :aws-access-key "XXXXXX" :aws-secret-key "XXXXXXXXXXX")
I'm working on extending this to support more of AWS's features, allow for a lot of the obvious settings (like the AWS region), provide better error hanlding, and built in support for HTML emails - but other than that it's working great so far.