SMS/Email Localisation in Cognito

Question

Hi,

We are planning a migration to Cognito for our authentication infrastructure, just wanted to find out the best way to send localised notifications (forgot password, email verification etc.) to users in different countries. I know we can send custom lambda triggers, but I couldn't find a documentation related to localisation which I believe is an important topic, thanks in advance

Answer

The nationality of the user is best stored in a custom string attribute of the user pool. Any lambda processing some trigger can then lookup the the value for the user in question.

Easiest would be to let an external email system do the localization. Usually a system like that will have mail-merge features and localized Content Management System. Lambda triggers can be used to do the right API calls on you system.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cognito/latest/developerguide/user-pool-lambda-custom-sender-triggers.html

The custom message triggers is a way to go if you want a lighter weight solution. In these methods you could lookup the nationality and return a email body in the right language. Be aware though that emails have a nasty way of specifiying content and styling. The customer messages are maxed at 20,000 UTF-8 characters. This seems a lot but it is reached sooner than you think when a lot of styling is used for various email client / phone sizes.

SMS/Email Localisation in Cognito

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