A few people have emailed me asking me to integrate the perl code snippet into I wrote to strip illegal headers when sending email via Amazon SES into something actually usable. I’ve done so! I haven’t really tested this beyond sending some test emails, but here it is. Use this at your own risk, I make no warranty, blah blah blah.

This fix requires editing ses-send-email.pl, so I’d advise making a backup copy, though I imagine you can always get a fresh version from Amazon if necessary.

Open ses-send-email.pl in a text editor and find the read_message method. It should look like this:
https://gist.github.com/1120804.js?file=ses-send-email.pl

Delete that and paste this in its place:
https://gist.github.com/1120804.js?file=evan-ses-send-email.pl

I tried it on the command line and it gave the output I expected – I haven’t tried integrating it with sendmail/postfix since I haven’t encountered this problem. Here’s the test message I attempted to send:

From: evan@example.com
To: evan@example.com
Subject: Email
Chicken: yummy
Cats: yucky
X-Zombies: kill them!

Now we're out of the header, into the body.  Grand!

From, To, and Subject are required headers. Chicken & Cats are illegal, X-Zombies should be ok since it’s X-ified. Here’s what happened when I tried to send with the unmodified ses-send-email.pl:

[Tue Aug 02 14:14:51 evan@EvanMBP 62 amazon-email]$ ./ses-send-email.pl --verbose -k aws-credentials -r
From: evan@example.com
To: evan@example.com
Subject: Email
Chicken: yummy
Cats: yucky
X-Zombies: kill them!

Now we're out of the header, into the body.  Grand!



  
    Sender
    InvalidParameterValue
    Illegal header 'Chicken'.
  
  5ffad294-bd33-11e0-b6e3-affca9ad1eb5

Illegal header 'Chicken'.

Illegal header error. Now with the modified version:

[Tue Aug 02 14:15:17 evan@EvanMBP 63 amazon-email]$ ./ses-send-email-x-headers.pl --verbose -k aws-credentials -r
From: evan@example.com
To: evan@example.com
Subject: Email
Chicken: yummy
Cats: yucky
X-Zombies: kill them!

Now we're out of the header, into the body.  Grand!



  
    000001318bb51442-c2cfb780-0604-4363-925a-54a57015e567-000000
  
  
    64e75a47-bd33-11e0-9d09-8f08f31615ad
  

No errors, and I received the email below (extraneous SMTP headers added by Barracuda/Exchange removed):

From: 
To: 
Subject: Email
X-Chicken: yummy
X-ASG-Orig-Subj: Email
X-Cats: yucky
X-Zombies: kill them!
Date: Tue, 2 Aug 2011 18:15:25 +0000
Message-ID: 
Content-Type: text/plain
MIME-Version: 1.0

Now we're out of the header, into the body.  Grand!

Illegal headers have been X-ified. Hope this helps someone.