You will want to use AWS SES via SMTP when you're launching an app that sends out emails of any kind (user registrations, email notifications, etc). For example, I have used this configuration on various Ruby on Rails apps, but it's basic SMTP configuration.

There are two ways to go about this:

• EASY WAY: Create an SMTP user via AWS SES [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/smtp-credentials.html#smtp-credentials-console]
• NOT SO EASY WAY: Create an SMTP password for an existing IAM user

Luckily, you found these MD files and the NOT SO EASY WAY is suddenly copy-pasta. sudo yum....

Assuming you've already set up your SES Policy on your IAM User:

    {
      "Version": "2012-10-17",
      "Statement": [
        {
          "Effect":"Allow",
          "Action":["ses:SendEmail", "ses:SendRawEmail"],
          "Resource":"*"
        }
      ]
    }

Go ahead and drop this into an bash session and pass in your IAM user's secret key to get back your SMTP password :)

    require 'openssl'
    require 'base64'

    def aws_iam_smtp_password_generator(secret)
      message = "SendRawEmail"
      versionInBytes = "\x02"
      signatureInBytes = OpenSSL::HMAC.digest('sha256', secret, message)
      signatureAndVer = versionInBytes + signatureInBytes
      smtpPassword = Base64.encode64(signatureAndVer)
    end

    <?php

      function aws_iam_smtp_password_generator($secret) {
        $message = "SendRawEmail";
        $versionInBytes = chr(2);
        $signatureInBytes = hash_hmac('sha256', $message, $secret, true);
        $signatureAndVer = $versionInBytes.$signatureInBytes;
        $smtpPassword = base64_encode($signatureAndVer);

        return $smtpPassword;
      }

    ?>

    # TODO

I'm not a Java programmer, yet, but AWS's documentation [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/smtp-credentials.html#smtp-credentials-convert] has a snippet you can use