Email-initiated workflow template

This repo contains starter code for creating an email-initiated automation using AWS SES and Lambda.

🧐 How it works

An email-initiated workflow is a way to automate a process using email as the trigger. Send an email to a specific address, and the workflow (a Lambda function in this case) will take action using the email's contents as the input.

graph LR
  A[Email] --Sends to--> B[SES]
  B --Stores in--> C[S3]
  C --Triggers--> D[Lambda]

1. An email is sent to a specific address associated with a domain that you own.
2. SES receives the email and stores it in an S3 bucket.
3. S3 triggers a Lambda function.
4. The Lambda function reads the email from S3 and runs your code against it.

🖼️ Examples

It's up to you to decide what the workflow does. Some example use cases:

• Parse expense emails using GPT-3, and add the data to rows in a spreadsheet
• Export Kindle reading highlights to a personal website

If you come up with something cool, I'd love to hear about it.

📂 Project structure

The codebase is written in TypeScript and uses AWS CDK to manage the AWS resources and deployments.

├── .github             # GitHub Actions workflows
├── bin
│   └── aws-app.ts      # AWS CDK entry point
├── lib
│   ├── reader.ts       # Lambda function for reading emails
│   ├── stacks          # AWS CDK stacks
│   └── constructs      # Groupings of AWS resources
└── tests

🧰 Setup instructions

1. This is a template repo. Create a new repo from it.
2. Follow these instructions to create your AWS environment.

🚀 Deploying updates

After you've ran through the setup instructions, you can deploy updates to the Lambda function or AWS resources by running:

npm run deploy

💅 Tips

• Pass environment variables to your Lambda function by updating the environment property in the NodejsFunction construct (search in LambdaS3Reader.ts).

• AWS CDK library docs are here

• By default, SES is in "Sandbox" mode. This means that you can only send emails to verified email addresses. This might be fine for personal projects. You can take this action to move out of sandbox mode..

• Resource not showing up in AWS? Make sure the region you're viewing in the console matches the region you're deploying to.

• If initial deploy fails and gets stuck in a failed state, you can delete the stack and try again. To preserve the SES domain identity, and destroy all other AWS resources (S3 bucket, SES rules, and Lambda function):

  Run the following, where {STACK_PREFIX} is the environment value from your .env

  npx cdk destroy --exclusively {STACK_PREFIX}-Reader

  You can run npx cdk ls to view the stack names that you can pass to the --exclusively flag. Or you can delete all stacks using the --all flag.