AWS Contact Center

Route emails to multiple Amazon Connect instances using SES Mail Manager

Global enterprises often design their customer service architecture using multiple Amazon Connect instances across regions – for example, using US region instances for US customers and EU region instances for EU customers. These organizations frequently need to route emails from a single domain to different regional Amazon Connect instances. This blog post demonstrates how Amazon SES Mail Manager provides an effective solution for routing emails to multiple Amazon Connect instances based on email recipients. Organizations using Amazon Connect often need to configure their DNS (Domain Name System) MX (Mail eXchange) records to route emails to Amazon SES endpoints. This blog post shows how Amazon SES Mail Manager enables routing from a single domain to multiple Amazon Connect instances, allowing organizations to implement region-specific email handling for their global customer base.

Overview of solution

Let’s consider a global fictitious enterprise organization, AnyCompany, implementing Amazon Connect to enable an omnichannel experience for their customers. AnyCompany has implemented two Amazon Connect instances: one in the US East (us-east-1) region for US customers, and another in the EU West (eu-west-2) region in London for European customers. They aim to route emails as follows:

  • us-support@cc.anycompany.com to the US East region instance
  • uk-support@cc.anycompany.com, fr-support@cc.anycompany.com, and gr-support@cc.anycompany.com to the London region instance

This setup allows AnyCompany to provide region-specific support while maintaining a single email domain.

AnyCompany would want to update MX record for their domain cc.anycompany.com to route all emails to Amazon SES receiving SMTP endpoints.

MX record routing is defined at the domain level (cc.anycompany.com) and not by recipient’s address, us-support@cc.anycompany.com, gr-support@cc.anycompany.com, fr-support@cc.anycompany.com and uk-support@cc.anycompany.com.

Walkthrough

Considering the above use case of AnyCompany,

  • For emails to be routed to Amazon Connect instance in us-east-1 region, the email should be routed to Amazon SES receiving endpoint “inbound-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com”
  • For emails to be routed to Amazon Connect instance in eu-west-2 region, the email should be routed to Amazon SES receiving endpoint “inbound-smtp.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com”

Using Amazon SES mail manager in one of the regions (here we have considered us-east-1) to accept all recipients email for a domain and then use mail manager rules to reroute the emails to respective region based on recipient address.

Prerequisites

Below are steps to configure the Amazon SES mail managers:

Step 1: Navigate to Amazon SES console page, Mail manager, Traffic policies, to define what traffic is allowed and denied. In the below example, default is set to deny all emails and allow only emails sent to recipient fr-support@cc.anycompany.com, gr-support@cc.anycompany.com, uk-support@cc.anycompany.com and us-support@cc.anycompany.com

Step 2: Create a SMTP relay destination for each Amazon Connect region with its respective Amazon SES receiving SMTP endpoints. In this case it’s us-east-1 and eu-west-2, hence we need two SMTP relay destination, “inbound-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com” and “inbound-smtp.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com”

  • Navigate to Amazon SES console page, Mail manager, SMTP relay

  • Click on create SMTP relay and create one SMTP relay for us-east-1

  • Click on create SMTP relay again and create another SMTP relay for eu-west-2

Step 3: Create a rule set which has set of rules to route the emails to respective region-based email recipient.

  • Navigate to Amazon SES console page, Mail manager, Rule sets and click on Create rule set and give a name for the rule set

  • Click on Create new rule

  • Click on Create new rule again

  • Define the routing based on email recipient with SMTP relay action

  • Add rules for each of the recipient

Step 4: Create an ingress endpoint. Navigate to Amazon SES console page, Mail manager, Ingress endpoints and click on Create ingress endpoint.

Note down the A record

Step 5: Update your domain DNS MX record to this A record of Ingress endpoint.

Step 6: Follow the steps in Amazon Connect admin guide to setup email channel in Amazon connect with custom domain

Cleaning up

To avoid incurring future charges, delete the resources that were created.

  1. Delete Mail manager, Traffic policies
  2. Delete Mail manager, SMTP relay
  3. Delete Mail manager, Rule sets
  4. Delete Mail manager, Ingress endpoints
  5. Remove the DNS MX record routing to SES ingress endpoints

Conclusion

This post demonstrated how a global enterprise can route emails from a domain to multiple Amazon Connect instances across regions.

To learn more about the technologies or features used to create this solution, explore the following pages:

About the authors

Manoj Anantha

APJ Senior Solution Architect, Amazon Connect

Assist Contact Centers in their journey to become Leaders in Customer Experience with AWS Cloud Services.

Deepak Bhatia

India GTM for Productivity Apps

In my current role, I am advancing the business development initiatives related to Amazon Connect.