workmail-intercepter-excel-to-csv

Transform incoming AWS WorkMail email with Excel attachment to CSV and save to S3 bucket

Goals

• Automate data ingestion when it's delivered by email
• Transform the data before storage

Prerequisites

• WorkMail email
• An existing S3 bucket to hold the CloudFormation template and Lambda source code
• An existing S3 bucket to hold the files

Limitation of the code

• The Lambda included only processes one Excel attachment in .xlsx format. You can extend the code to process any number of attachments in any format.
• If you do have a lot of attachments, recommended way is to only download the files and send messages to SQS to have a separate Lambda to transform the data.

Lambda Layers

We will be using Lambda layers below from Klayers:

• pandas
• numpy
• openyxl

Lambda Function Deployment

The Lambda function lambda/app.py is written in Python, it's self-explanatory. Modify it to your need.

We want to provision the function using CloudFormation, so that all the infrastructure is in code. Hence follow the steps below.

Modify template.yaml

Parameters:
  AppName:
    Type: String
    Default: workmail-intercepter-excel-to-csv
    Description: The application name.

  OriginFile:
    Type: String
    Default: attachment.xlsx
    Description: -<
      The name of the original file.
      It can be any name but must ends with .xlsx extension.

  DestinationFile:
    Type: String
    Default: report.csv
    Description: -<
      The file name to save in the S3 bucket. Must ends with .csv extension.

  DestinationBucket:
    Type: String
    Default: workmail-intercepter-excel-to-csv
    Description: The destination bucket.

  WorkMailOrganizationId:
    Type: String
    Default: REPLACE-ME
    Description: The WorkMail organization ID.

Modify deploy.sh

#!/bin/bash

CLOUDFORMATION_BUCKET=your-own-cloudformation-bucket
STACK_NAME=workmail-intercepter-excel-to-csv
PROFILE=default
REGION=us-east-1

Run ./deploy.sh

WorkMail configurations

Go to Amazon WorkMail :: Organization Settings :: Inbound rules :: Create new inbound rule as screenshot below.

Finally

Send a test email with .xslx attachment to your WorkMail email. You should have the attachment file automatically intercepted, transformed, cataloged and saved to S3.

Credits

• Python layers: https://github.com/keithrozario/Klayers
• Processing Email Attachments with AWS: https://medium.com/caspertechteam/processing-email-attachments-with-aws-a35a1411a0c4