Question

I would like to know if there is a way to substitute/replace values in the body of a message. Let’s say I have something like this:

Hello %user_first %user_last, thanks for checking out our site. Blah, blah, blah...

unsubscribe 
<a href='mysite.com/unsubscribe?uid=%unsibscribe_id&token=%some_token'>
    HERE
</a>
<img src='mysite.com/images/user-opened-email.gif?sid=%some_id'>

where %user_first, %user_last, %unsibscribe_id, %some_token, and %some_id are user specific values and cannot be the same from one email to the other.

Ideally this would happen in just one API call rather than doing a srt_replace and calling the API multiple times.

Help is appreciated.

Answer 1

There is nothing like that built into the Amazon SES service.

In PHP, this would be pretty easy to do with some basic templating.

foreach ($users as $user)
{
    $template = <<<TEMPLATE
Hello ${user_first} ${user_last}, thanks for checking out our site. Blah, blah, blah...

unsubscribe 
<a href='mysite.com/unsubscribe?uid=${unsubscribe_id}&token=${some_token}'>
    HERE
</a>
<img src='mysite.com/images/user-opened-email.gif?sid=${some_id}'>
TEMPLATE;

    // (code to send email...)
}

As for this:

Ideally this would happen in just one API call rather than doing a srt_replace [sic] and calling the API multiple times.

I’m not quite sure what you mean. Each call to the SendEmail operation sends a single email, so you’d need to make one API call per email anyway.

Were you expecting something different?