Hi, Adrian, and welcome back.
Now, in today's video will be looking into some of the important pointers related to connecting to
a SMTP endpoint.
So at a high level overview, if you want to send an email using the SES SMTP interface, you have to
connect to the appropriate SMTP endpoint.
However, there is one important requirement that the SES SMTP endpoint requires that all the connections
be encrypted using the TLS.
So if you have to see from the diagrammatic perspective the SMTP endpoint, you have to make use of
TLS here.
Now when we discuss about the mechanisms for establishing a TLS connections, there are two primary
ones.
First one is the start TLS and second one is the TLS wrapper.
Now, before we proceed further, in fact, let's quickly look into these from the SES console.
So currently I am into the SES console.
Now if you'll quickly look into the SMTP settings, apart from the credentials, if you see the transport
layer, security is required and then you have the start TLS port and the TLS wrapper, depending upon
which one you use, the port numbers will also change.
So let's look into the approach number one, which is that.
TLS So at a high level overview start, TLS is means of upgrading an unencrypted connection to an encrypted
connection.
And to set up the start TLS you have to make use of the appropriate port.
In this case, it is 25, five, 87 or two, five, eight, seven.
And after you connect to the port and issue a command, you have to wait for the server to announce
its supports for the start.
TLS SMTP extension post this.
The client then issues the START TLS command, initiating the TLS negotiation, and when the overall
negotiation is complete you have the new encrypted connection.
So we can also look into it from the diagrammatic perspective.
So before the encrypted email takes place, you have the TLS negotiation that takes place between an
email client and email server.
And before that the email server also announces about the TLS, and then the process also starts from
the client perspective.
The second approach is the TLS wrapper.
Now the TLS wrapper is a means of initiating an encrypted connection without first establishing an unencrypted
connection.
So this is one of the primary differences.
And when we discuss about TLS wrapper here, the SMTP endpoint does not perform the TLS negotiation.
In fact, it is the client's responsibility to connect using TLS and to continue using TLS for the entire
conversation.
And again, your point to note is that if you want to make use of the TLS wrapper, you have the port
of 465 or two, four, six, five.
So that's a very high level overview and with this will conclude today's video.