CODEWITHSUNDEEP
amazon-web-servicesamazon-sqs
Yalamber
Yalamber

Reputation: 7580

How to handle large Emailing queue and delivery with AWS SES?

We are developing an app. that need to handle large email queues. We have planned to store emails in a SQS queue and use SES to send emails. but a bit confused on how to actually handle the queue and process queue. should I use cronjob to regularly read the SQS queue and send emails? What would be the best way to actually trigger the script that will be emailing from our app?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1936

Answers (1)

Charles Engelke
Charles Engelke

Reputation: 5649

Using SQS with SES is a great way to handle this. If something goes wrong while emailing the request will still be on the queue and will be processed next time around.

I just use a cron job that starts my queue processing/email sending job once an hour. The job runs for an hour as a simple loop:

while i've been running < 1 hour:
    if there's a message in the queue:
        process the message
        delete the message from the queue

I set the WaitTimeSeconds parameter to the maximum (20 seconds) so that the check for a new message will wait a while for a new message if necessary so that the job isn't hitting AWS every few milliseconds. Otherwise, I could put a sleep statement of some kind in the loop.

The reason I run for just an hour is that the job might encounter some error that kills it, or have a memory leak, or some other unanticipated problem. This way any queued email requests will still get handled the next time the job is started.

If you want, you can start the job every fifteen minutes so you'll always have four worker processes handling queue requests. If one of them dies for some reason, you'll still be processing with the other three.

Upvotes: 2

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