I have an existing application that I wanted to integrate Amazon SES into. I of course, wanted to change as little code as possible. The most unobtrusive way is to configure sendmail to use SES and not the default relay transport method. No code has to be changed and you're up and running. However, SES sends back error messages and message IDs that I wanted to capture about my system's emails. Also, from an architecture perspective I think it's better to have the API calls in the code and not rely on a system level configuration.

This code is simple and demonstrates the extensibility of the EmailComponent.

<?php
App::import('Vendor','aws-sdk', array('file' => 'sdk.class.php'));
App::import('Component','Email');
class EmailServiceComponent extends EmailComponent {
   
   function _aws_ses() {
      $ses = new AmazonSES();
      $destination = array(
         'ToAddresses' => explode(',', $this->to)
      );
      $message = array(
         'Subject' => array(
            'Data' => $this->subject
         ),
         'Body' => array()
      );
      if($this->textMessage != NULL) {
         $message['Body']['Text'] = array(
            'Data' => $this->textMessage
         );
      }
      if($this->htmlMessage != NULL) {
         $message['Body']['Html'] = array(
            'Data' => $this->htmlMessage
         );
      }
      
      $response = $ses->send_email($this->from, $destination, $message);
      
      $ok = $response->isOK();
      if(!$ok) {
         $this->log('Error sending email from AWS SES: '.$response->body->asXML(), 'debug');
      }
      return $ok;
   }
   
}

Then you need to replace every occurrence of EmailComponent with EmailServiceComponent, and set the delivery like this:

$this->EmailService->delivery = 'aws_ses';

This code also utilizes Amazon's SDK for PHP - you'll have to hunt that down and install in app/vendors. This code works because the EmailComponent just reflects the delivery attribute to a private method call ( _delivery() ), which makes it nice and easy to extend. Kudos to the Cake team for creating an extensible component and kudos to Amazon for solving my email dilemma. I hope the code helps someone out!