How to make AWS notification emails readable

AWS sends maintenance windows, certificate renewals, runtime deprecations, billing and security alerts, and much else besides, all by email. The subject line rarely says whether anything has to be done, and the body is a wall of 12-digit account IDs and resource IDs.

With one account you can simply read them. An MSP or a dev shop holding several accounts per customer ends up checking each notice against a spreadsheet to find out whose it is, and then leaves it for later. The usual failure is that the one notice that needed action is buried among the marketing mail.

In Sabaki each customer is a group, and creating one issues a forwarding address that belongs to it (@in.sabaki.cloud). A forwarding rule in Gmail or Microsoft 365 that sends mail from AWS to that address is the whole of the setup. Nothing has to change about where your root email is received, and the AWS console stays closed.

Each mail that arrives is checked against its DKIM signature first, to see whether AWS really sent it, and the verdict is shown on every message. The AWS account IDs in the body are then extracted and matched automatically against the customers and accounts already registered. Finally Anthropic's Claude, on Amazon Bedrock, writes the summary and the explanation of what is happening, what it affects and what to do, and sets a severity (Critical, Action required or Info) and a deadline.

Instead of subject lines there is one plain sentence per notice, so running your eye down the inbox is enough to see what has to be dealt with today. Notices with a deadline show it, and whether they were handled is written into the response ledger. So is who decided that no action was needed, and when, so if the person in charge changes, whoever takes over knows what was decided.

• Critical: an account suspension notice, a failed payment, a security breach — act now
• Action required: a maintenance reboot, a certificate expiring, a runtime being retired — act before the deadline
• Info: the bill closing, a feature announcement — reading it is enough

It takes about 10 minutes. Once the forwarding rule exists, the next notice that arrives comes back explained.

• Sign in to Sabaki and add a group for that customer: its forwarding address is issued straight away
• In Gmail or Microsoft 365, create a rule that forwards mail sent by AWS to that address (the steps are in the help pages)
• Check the inbox, and register a Slack channel or an email address as a destination if you want automatic delivery

The inbox and the summary and explanation are on the Free plan ($0: 1 seat, 1 AWS account). Automatic delivery to Slack or email, several accounts and sharing with your team start at Team ($19 per month, tax excluded).