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Not legal advice

dpdpkit is software that helps you implement obligations under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 and the DPDP Rules, 2025. It does not provide legal advice and does not guarantee compliance.

Email delivery

dpdpkit sends one kind of message that has legal weight: the pre-erasure warning (Rule 8). An erasure only runs after its warning is recorded as delivered, and only once the full warning period has passed since that moment. So the notifier you choose decides what "delivered" means.

Notifier "Delivered" means Use it for
NullNotifier (default) Never: every send fails Keeps erasure switched off until you choose a transport
ConsoleNotifier Printed to the console Local development only
SmtpNotifier Accepted by your SMTP relay Any provider with SMTP
SesNotifier Accepted by Amazon SES SES without event tracking
SesNotifier(track_delivery=True) SES reports the recipient's mail server accepted it The strongest evidence available

SMTP

from dpdpkit import SmtpNotifier

notifier = SmtpNotifier("smtp.example.in", 587, sender="privacy@example.in",
                        username=os.environ["SMTP_USER"], password=os.environ["SMTP_PASSWORD"])

Amazon SES

pip install --pre "dpdpkit[ses]"

from dpdpkit.ses import SesNotifier

notifier = SesNotifier("privacy@example.in", region="ap-south-1")

Credentials come from the usual AWS chain (environment, instance role, ~/.aws). The sender address or its domain must be verified in SES, and the account must be out of the SES sandbox to email anyone.

Tracked delivery

With track_delivery=True, a message SES accepts is recorded as queued. The pre-erasure warning does not count, and no erasure clock starts, until SES reports a Delivery event. A Bounce, Reject or Rendering Failure moves the erasure to needs_attention for a person to resolve.

One-time AWS setup:

  1. Create an SES configuration set (for example dpdp) with an event destination that publishes Delivery, Bounce, Reject and Rendering failure events to an SNS topic.
  2. Create an SQS queue and subscribe it to that topic.
  3. Give the app's IAM role ses:SendEmail and, on the queue, sqs:ReceiveMessage and sqs:DeleteMessage.

Then:

from dpdpkit.ses import SesNotifier, poll_ses_events

notifier = SesNotifier("privacy@example.in", region="ap-south-1",
                       configuration_set="dpdp", track_delivery=True)

# every minute, next to the retention job (scheduler, cron or a worker):
poll_ses_events(kit, "https://sqs.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/123456789012/dpdp-ses")

Each message carries a dpdpkit_receipt tag, so events are matched to dpdpkit's delivery receipts. Events for mail dpdpkit did not send are ignored. A queue message is deleted only after its event has been recorded.

Why a queue and not an HTTPS endpoint

A forged "delivered" event would start an erasure clock early. Reading events from SQS with your own AWS credentials means only SES can produce them. If you must receive SNS over HTTPS instead, verify every SNS message signature before calling apply_ses_event.

SMS and WhatsApp

The built-in notifiers send email only; SMS and WhatsApp messages get a failed receipt. Implement the Notifier protocol (one method, send(message) -> DeliveryReceipt) to use another provider. Return DeliveryStatus.QUEUED when the provider confirms later, and report the outcome with kit.retention.confirm_warning_delivery(receipt_id, delivered).