360Works Email Plugin & Amazon SNS problem

[CompuCon]

Per 360Works documentation for sending SMS Messages using their plugin, I created an Amazon SES Account and IAM User. I created the Access Keys used by the plugin, and I was successful sending SMS Messages for about 10 days. Abruptly, the ability to send SMS has stopped, and I do not receive any errors in my scriptstep "EmailSMSSend" using the FM Debugger. It appears that FileMaker is able to hand off the message to Amazon, and it dies there. I have tried creating other IAM Users (although the plugin only requires the Access Keys). I have created new Access Keys, with the same failure. Using the Amazon Management Console, I cannot see any errors that I can correct (I find their Console and UI incredibly daunting). The Console talks about Topics and Subscriptions, but I don't understand how that applies to my need.

Does anyone have any insight to my plight, and where I can resolve the issue?

[ryan360Works]

Hi CompuCon,  

In this context, Topics are essentially just a name for a group of subscriptions. Somewhat similar to an email campaign. Subscriptions are the recipients of the "campaign". The Email Plugin creates a Topic name from the list of numbers that you include as recipients. A quick test: Take note of the topic names in AWS account then in FileMaker call EmailSendSMS with a list of numbers you can easily identify. Once you have called the function, go back to AWS and check and see if a new Topic was created. I would also like to take a look at your plugin logs to see if any errors are being set that aren't being presented to you. Please try the above test and then send an email with what you see and attach your plugin logs tp [email protected]. Please be sure to send the logs before any restarts of FileMaker as restarting will overwrite the logs. See this page for log locations.

[CompuCon]

I wish to really thank Ryan from 360Works for being so incredibly helpful with this problem. The problem I experienced was not due to anything wrong with the Email Plugin. The problem solely occurred at Amazon. Through multiple emails with Ryan, and spending wayyyyy too time reading through Amazon's murky documentation, I was able to restore functionality of sending SMS messages. I never received any error messages from their (Amazon) site, but I could tell that messages were reaching their servers. I can't tell you exactly what was the exact trick that worked, but as suggested by Ryan, I increased the spending limit budget and changed the style of message from "promotional" to "transactional". I made other modifications, but I feel that the main changes solved the issue. Ryan sent me link from other Amazon clients that had had similar problems. I'm not impressed with their attention to support. I have 36 years of IT industry experience, but their user interface totally lacks easy comprehension.

Again, I want to thank Ryan and everyone at 360Works for superior customer service.

 

[360Works]

You are quite welcome! We are so glad to hear this! @CompuCon