Sending emails from Redmine using AWS SES

Photo by Adam Solomon on Unsplash

A few days ago I decided to stop using Phabricator and start with Redmine, the decision merely was because of the resources used on the server, big surprise because Redmine is very simple to install and set-up as well. Don't misunderstand me, Phabricator is great but has a lot of things that I never used.

But something that wasn't working at the beginning was the email notifications, in my case, I'm using AWS SES and the configuration file ({redmine_folder}/config/configuration.yml) doesn't provide an example for SES, because I know this can be useful for somebody else, I'm gonna share this piece of code.

production:
  email_delivery:
    delivery_method: :smtp
    smtp_settings:
        address: "aws email server address"
        port: 587
        enable_starttls_auto: true
        domain: "your custom domain"
        authentication: :login
        username: "username provided from smtp settings"
        password: "password provided from smtp settings"

My issue was that I didn't create the right credentials from AWS SES, so I was having an error saying:

Net::SMTPAuthenticationError (535 Authentication Credentials Invalid)

And basically, to fix this you just need to create the AIM user from the SMTP Settings in the SES console and not from the AIM page and don't forget the user you specify is not the user you use to authenticate, at the end of the process AWS SES will give the username and password you need to configure your client.