Add SES Support to a Cognito User Pool in CDK

Integrating SES with Cognito User Pools in CDK #

Every time a user signs up for our application or requests a password recovery, AWS Cognito sends them an email. By default, Cognito sends emails from no-reply@verificationemail.com.

The default email configuration has many restrictions and quotas, for example - we can only send 50 emails per day and the subject of the email has to be less than 140 characters long.

Since the Level 2 UserPool construct doesn't expose a property for integrating with SES, we have to use an escape hatch to update the email configuration.

In order to configure SES for a Cognito User Pool in CDK, we have to get access to the CfnUserPool construct and update its emailConfiguration property.

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const userPool = new cognito.UserPool(this, 'user-pool-id', {
  //...rest
});

// 👇 update Email sender for Cognito Emails
const cfnUserPool = userPool.node.defaultChild as cognito.CfnUserPool;
cfnUserPool.emailConfiguration = {
  emailSendingAccount: 'DEVELOPER',
  replyToEmailAddress: 'YOUR_EMAIL@example.com',
  sourceArn: `arn:aws:ses:YOUR_COGNITO_SES_REGION:${
    cdk.Stack.of(this).account
  }:identity/YOUR_FROM_EMAIL@example.com`,
};

Let's go over the properties we've set for email configuration:

emailSendingAccount specifies whether Cognito should use the default email provider or our custom SES configuration. The DEVELOPER setting indicates that we'll provide our custom SES config.
replyToEmailAddress specifies the email address users will be replying to
sourceArn specifies the ARN of a verified email address. Note that cognito only integrates with SES in 3 regions: us-east-1, us-west-2, eu-west-1. The SES from-email has to be verified in the specific region, and your SES account must be out of the sandbox.

Cognito only integrates with SES in 3 regions - us-east-1, us-west-2 and eu-west-1 - Cognito Docs

Add SES Support to a Cognito User Pool in CDK

Integrating SES with Cognito User Pools in CDK #

Further Reading #

Borislav Hadzhiev