Amazon Pinpoint vs. Amazon SES/SMS - amazon-web-services

I would like to send a verification code to a specific user (only one) via email or text message. I have successfully done so through Amazon SES but I have not attempted through Amazon SMS yet. I have found myself going down the rabbit hole of investigating AWS Pinpoint.
It seems to me Pinpoint is meant for mass user messaging (text/email) rather than one-of individual messaging. I'm hoping I gathered that correctly.
My question, is there an advantage/disadvantage of using Pinpoint over Amazon SES and SMS for my use case?

This may be addressed by the Pinpoint FAQ
Q: I already use Amazon SNS or Amazon SES. What do I gain by switching
to Amazon Pinpoint?
In typical Amazon SNS and Amazon SES use cases, you have to set up
your application to manage each message's audience, content, and
delivery schedule. These same features are built in to Amazon
Pinpoint. With Amazon Pinpoint, you can create message templates,
delivery schedules, highly-targeted segments, and full campaigns.
Pinpoint also appears to be able to push notifications to users through the users preferred contact mechanism. This means that you are not limited to SMS and you reach your users with activation codes through the means they want to be reached. It also allows two-way communication.
The Pinpoint homepage also says:
You can send direct messages—such as order confirmations, welcome
messages, and one-time passwords—using the console or the Amazon
Pinpoint REST API. You can also use the API to build custom
applications that deliver campaign and transactional messages across
multiple channels.
This suggest it is suitable for your uses, though it has additional mass-communication features you do not currently need.

In addition to above points mentioned by #Freiheit you can send and receive SMS messages through Amazon Pinpoint. This will help you to track user response and create surveys, reviews and quiz like scenarios.
Check this AWS Documentation link

Related

Unable to add sender ID to AWS SNS text messages

I live in India and I have this requirement where I need to change the default sender Id of text messages sent via AWS SNS to the one that is registered for our organization with TRAI. We are trying to send SMS text messages to customers with Indian mobile numbers. I tried passing TemplateID and EntityId that was issued to us by our provider on the AWS console to manually test things out by unfortunately, whenever I receive text message on my mobile, the sender name still shows a random number assigned by AWS and not the sender id that I configured. I also made sure that the template message approved by TRAI is exactly the same but it did not work either. There are no error logs on AWS either because the message was successfully delivered. Its just that the sender id is not the one that I had configured it to be.
Any help on this topic would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance!
P.S. We registered our template on JIO which is a Telecom provider here in India.
You can't use AWS SNS for this. You have to use AWS Pinpoint if you want to use your specific number. With Pinpoint you can also use short-codes and long-codes and can also configure your messages to be promotional or transactional. You can set your sender id in AWS pinpoint as well. Check the documentation below on how to do that.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/pinpoint/latest/userguide/channels-sms-awssupport-sender-id.html
It doesn't matter if you have any registration with any telco providers as AWS will use it's own infra to send the messages. So you either have to use 100% AWS solution or 100% telco provider services. You can't mix and match both for SMS sending use-case.
UPDATE:
Well SNS and Pinpoint are 2 different services for 2 different use cases. SNS is only for "notifications" and Pinpoint is like a communication service.
As far as sender-id in SNS is concerned, some countries require it as a hard requirement. You can read more about it in the documentation below:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sns/latest/dg/channels-sms-awssupport-sender-id.html
AWS SNS does support using sender IDs together with template and entity IDs for targeting India. If you follow the instructions at https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sns/latest/dg/channels-sms-senderid-india.html, you'll be able to do this.

Can we save client SMS responses in AWS Pinpoint's 2-way SMS?

I know that Amazon Pinpoint enables 2-way SMS, but I was wondering whether it was possible to save the message that the client sends. I'm finding myself going down the AWS rabbit-hole a bit, but I was wondering if anyone has any recommendations as to what AWS services could hold onto response data.
Just to clarify, I understand that Pinpoint allows us to return automated messages when the client passes a keyword. I am also aware that we can create user segments to save user attributes, I am moreso inquiring whether there is a way to stream user responses (that are not keywords) to another service or topic. Thank you!
An overview of Amazon Pinpoint two-way messaging can be summarized as per the above sample architecture.
You can capture the incoming messages from your users using the SNS topic you would have created when activating Pinpoint two-way messaging i.e When your users reply to your SMS message using the long code number, Amazon Pinpoint sends a JSON payload to the Amazon SNS topic that you designated. As a developer you handle these incoming messages by adding subscriptions to this SNS topic. The supported subscriptions include SQS, Lambda, email, HTTPS endpoint or SMS.
A sample JSON payload that your SNS topic subscriptions would receive would resemble the following :
{
"originationNumber":"+27155550000",
"destinationNumber":"+2722255511111",
"messageKeyword":"START",
"messageBody":"Hello World from Amazon Pinpoint",
"inboundMessageId":"cae173d2-66b9-564c-8309-66b9",
"previousPublishedMessageId":"wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY"
}
Hope this Helps!

Amazon Pinpoint API vs AWS Simple Notification Services

For the purpose of sending push notifications from the backend, if we need a Push Notification Platform, could you please suggest which of these is intended for that purpose – Amazon SNS or Pinpoint?
Both Amazon SNS and Amazon Pinpoint, supports sending push notification to various devices (e.g Android, iOS etc)
The major difference between Amazon SNS & Amazon Pinpoint is that :
with Amazon SNS you have to set up your application to manage each message's audience, content, and delivery schedule. On the other hand, with Amazon Pinpoint you do not have to code these features, most of them are already built in. With Amazon Pinpoint, you can collect data about your app usage, create highly-targeted segments and send full campaigns(either immediate or scheduled) plus many more features.

AWS SES - Logging SendEmail & SendRawEmail calls (SMTP)

We've changed our email service from Mandrill to Amazon SES. We are using it with SMTP.
In Mandrill we had access to some details such as:
raw content of the emails
delivery dates
is the email viewed by the recipient
are the links in the email clicked
But in SES Management Console > Sending Statistics page it shows only the numbers without any details for deliveries, bounces, complaints & rejects.
And I've looked into CloudTrail, CloudWatch & S3 combination with no luck. Also I'm not sure if this is still valid but this page says
All Amazon SES APIs except for the email-sending APIs (SendEmail and SendRawEmail) are supported.
So I can't seem to log these data with CloudTrail.
Can I log them via another method (maybe a third party tool?). How do other people log these? Or do they? Maybe it's not possible with SMTP but possible with only API?
Example scenario
We're using multiple IAM access keys (with multiple users) for SES. Let's say there is 50% increase in complaints. Doesn't AWS offer any tool to find the culprit access key?
I had found this thread when trying to get easy access to who Amazon SES sent emails to, at what time, etc. I found the tutorials at Amazon pretty helpful:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/event-publishing-tutorials.html
I actually tried all four of them. I couldn't figure out how to get the CloudWatch path to actually show who the email went to, but the other ones worked. I eventually settled on the Amazon Redshift path:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/event-publishing-redshift.html
It works well for me and provides an SQL query view into the "log" data. They do have a new Query tool, so you don't have to use JDBC/ODBC if you don't want to.
Hoping this will help someone else looking...
For raw content logging, you would have to proxy the SMTP requests through some service that logs everything and then sends it to SES, or just log everything in your code before making the call to SES.
For delivery rates you would have to setup SNS listeners to process SES bounce notifications.
For email viewed and links clicked you would have to build your own analytics service to add tracking to the emails you send, or find some third-party service that does that for you.
There is a reason SES is so much cheaper than other email services like Mandrill, it is because you don't get all the features that the other services provide. Honestly if you want things like click tracking analytics I would suggest you rethink moving away from Mandrill, or look at other email services like SendGrid. SES is more of a raw email sending service that doesn't provide any of those higher-level features you are looking for.

Amazon AWS send text messages using C#

I have an AWS account ./ server. How can I send a text message in C# from a desktop app using AWS. I can't seem to find any examples or helpful docs.
thanks
AWS doesn't offer a general purpose SMS messaging platform. It's SNS product does allow SMS as one of the optional delivery methods, but its not useful in a lot of scenarios because it requires users devices to be 'subscribed' before getting text messages.
A better choice for a general purpose SMS messaging solution is going to be Twilio or Clickatel or other similar vendors - both of those can easily send general purpose/custom SMS messages to any cell phone (in countries they support), without the user previously subscribing to the service, using C# from a desktop app.
You need REST API hosted on your AWS EC2. Then you create desktop application that call http request to that service.