Comments on: A rock-solid setup for sending SMTP mail from your EC2 web server

By: nguyen

nguyen — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 12:45:17 +0000

I’m looking a good send mail solution for Email Marketing service http://www.vinacontact.com but EC2 seem a bad choice.

By: Joshua

Joshua — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 22:29:06 +0000

Some things have improved since this post was written. Amazon has improved their service relating to email sending by allowing users to setup reverse DNS for mail sending. The form to raise your limits and set reverse DNS can be found here: https://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/html-forms-controller/contactus/ec2-email-limit-rdns-request

This helps as long as you have a clean Elastic IP address. Obviously, this still requires setting up your mail server, opening up the right ports and securing it.

There are also some new services starting to get into the game with different pricing structures and API’s than the traditional relay services. One example is http://elasticemail.com.

By: David

David — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 20:50:36 +0000

Angle brackets got munged in my last post. See vendor/plugs/exception_notification/README for example of configuring the from address.

By: David

David — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 20:48:49 +0000

If you are using the Rails Exception Notifier plug in it sends mail from ‘exception.notifier@default.com’ by default and AuthSMTP won’t allow that so in config/initializers/exception_notifier.rb add a line “ExceptionNotifier.sender_address = %(”Exception Notifier” )”

By: Pravin

Pravin — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 08:40:51 +0000

I configured the Postfix with Authsmtp with Amazon machine.
But i am getting this error.
” SASL authentication failed; server mail.authsmtp.com[62.13.128.193] said: 535 5.7.0 authentication failed ”

Apr 28 04:33:44 domU-12-31-39-02-24-E2 postfix/qmgr[15143]: D94DC98021: from=, size=674, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Apr 28 04:33:45 domU-12-31-39-02-24-E2 postfix/smtp[26482]: D94DC98021: to=, relay=mail.authsmtp.com[62.13.128.193]:25, delay=0.88, delays=0.09/0.01/0.78/0, dsn=5.7.0, status=bounced (SASL authentication failed; server mail.authsmtp.com[62.13.128.193] said: 535 5.7.0 authentication failed)
Apr 28 04:33:46 domU-12-31-39-02-24-E2 postfix/qmgr[15143]: B8B9C98022: removed

Can you help me how i can resolve this.It will help me not .

Thanks

By: Paul Dowman

Paul Dowman — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 19:08:35 +0000

An,

Make sure you you set the following:

myhostname = http://www.YOURDOMAIN.com
mydomain = YOURDOMAIN.com
myorigin = $mydomain

It’s been a while since I wrote this article, and I haven’t done any postfix configuration lately so if that doesn’t help then I don’t know what to suggest, but it did work for me.

By: An

An — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 15:25:12 +0000

Hello,
I have followed all the steps above but am facing a problem
Here is the problem
Assume my domain name is dn.com and i want to send mail from info@dn.com then i have made the necessary replacements in the postfix main.cf

I am using mail function in my php script and have made sure that the from header is info@dn.com. I have also registered info@dn.com in authsmtp
I dont know why, but when an email is sent it is sent as root@localhost.localdomain. As a result authsmtp rejects it and the email never reaches the recepient.
here is the error msg from authsmtp “Envelope From Address of is not authorised”

Could you please help me with what is going wrong.

Thank you

By: Frederic Sidler

Frederic Sidler — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:27:15 +0000

I’m an authsmtp user for a while. And things seem to have changed. Will this new reverse DNS for Amazon EC2 instance functionnality change the game?

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/03/reverse-dns-for-ec2s-elastic-ip-addresses.html

I can’t wait for a blog post about it ;-)

By: Paul Dowman

Paul Dowman — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 15:21:38 +0000

Pravin,
AuthSMTP requires all “from” addresses need to be registered and authorized individually, you do that at http://control.authsmtp.com.

By: Pravin

Pravin — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 14:15:54 +0000

Hi
I installed Postfix with Amazon Ec2 instance.
I am using relay host mail.authsmtp.com .
I done all the configuration in the Postfix configuration file.
I am getting this error in the SMTP control panel.
Error : Envelope From Address of is not authorised - go to: http://control.authsmtp.com

Any one can me tell that how i can resolve this?

Thanks

By: zardoz

zardoz — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:58:12 +0000

Thanks so much for this Paul, works beautifully on our setup sending ~500k emails per month. I am still amazed how much easier/more ‘english’ the Postfix configuration is than Sendmail. Glad to be rid of that POS.

By: chris

chris — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 08:17:20 +0000

I also relay my emails to a postfix relay server on a slicehost account that has the correct DNS PTR records. Emails to hotmail went to the spam folder so I had to remove email headers containing the internal EC2 hostname. This is done in the postfix relay servers main.cf:

header_checks = regexp:/etc/postfix/maps/header_checks

And the in /etc/postfix/maps/header_checks:

# Sample For Dropping Headers:
#/^Header: IfContains/ IGNORE
/^Received: from domU-12-34-56-78-90-AB.compute-1.internal/ IGNORE
/^Received: by domU-12-34-56-78-90-AB.compute-1.internal/ IGNORE

By: Rick

Rick — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 18:06:46 +0000

Ok well if I hard code the the internal IP of the frontend instance in the $mynetworks variable in main.cf, like 10.x.x.x, it will connect and send the mail. However, this IP changes for every frontend server. How can I get the server to allow all mail?

By: Rick

Rick — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 18:30:40 +0000

Paul,

Thanks for the tutorial. How can I adjust the config file to allow all my frontend instances relay through one centralized postfix server in the same security group? I can’t figure out how to get it to allow connections from my other instances.

Thanks!

By: Ryan

Ryan — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 22:18:24 +0000

Shaokun - I too have had an issue recently with emails to yahoo addresses disappearing when sent from AuthSMTP. I just filled out the link you provided - if you have heard anything from Yahoo, please let us know.

By: Shaokun

Shaokun — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 09:38:11 +0000

Good post! I have followed this article and set up AuthSMTP for our web site. But recently, a few of the customers who use yahoo account complaint that they never get the emails. I check it and found that with AuthSMTP, those emails to yahoo just got disappeared. Without AuthSMTP, just SPF, they were caught in the trash folder.

So I asked the support of AuthSMTP. They suggest to fill the form from Yahoo:
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/bulkv2.html

Have filled that form, but so far, no feedback and no help at all.

Any idea? Seems that other people have the same problem too.

By: Paul Dowman

Paul Dowman — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 17:01:19 +0000

Prakash: It might help to have an “Elastic IP” that you’ve controlled for a while, but I don’t really know.

By: Prakash

Prakash — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:54:11 +0000

I heard Amazon has started giving static IPs. Does it clear this problem in any way?

By: Rob

Rob — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 04:00:21 +0000

Awesome. Came in handy in a pinch. Thanks for the contribution.

By: Paul Dowman

Paul Dowman — Sat, 23 May 2009 13:17:22 +0000

Oh, you mean the postfix daemon has died and isn’t accepting SMTP connections. You don’t need to use SMTP to send mail from your app if the mail server on the same instance. You can use “sendmail style” delivery, which I’m pretty sure will work even if the postfix daemon is dead or isn’t accepting SMTP connections. The mail will be queued locally until postfix is running again.

I haven’t tested that though, it’s just what I think will happen.