Comments for Paul Dowman

Comment on A rock-solid setup for sending SMTP mail from your EC2 web server by Paul Dowman

Paul Dowman — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 12:43:37 +0000

Frederic: Sorry, I don’t know. Maybe they’re going into the spam folder, perhaps some of the people who received it clicked the spam button? Make sure you have an unsubscribe link that’s easy to find in the email so they’re less likely to mark it as spam.

Comment on EC2 on Rails version 0.9.9 released by Paul Dowman

Paul Dowman — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 12:41:01 +0000

I wish I could have a schedule for that, but I just do it on my spare time which seems to be pretty rare at the moment!

Comment on A rock-solid setup for sending SMTP mail from your EC2 web server by frederic sidler

frederic sidler — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 09:46:43 +0000

Using Authsmtp for a while, email are not delivered to Yahoo account anymore. I contact AuthSMTP regarding this problem. From the web app emails are sent. I can see them in AuthSMTP control panel, but email are not delivered at all to Yahoo customer ! We should I look at. How can I investigate ?

Comment on EC2 on Rails version 0.9.9 released by Stephen

Stephen — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 19:17:11 +0000

Are you expecting to roll out 1.0 of EC2 on Rails soon? :)

Comment on Got Git by Julien

Julien — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 08:39:04 +0000

Smart move, but I am not convinced they’re the best ones for non open-source projects. I am using unfuddle and I have to say their service is flawless -until now-!

Comment on How to convert from Subversion to Git by floehopper

floehopper — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 22:36:59 +0000

Thanks - that’s helpful. In case anyone else finds it useul, here’s a quick one-liner to list all the users that have committed to your svn repository…

svn log –quiet | grep ‘^r.*’ | cut -d ‘ ‘ -f 3 | sort | uniq

Comment on How to convert from Subversion to Git by Gianni Chiappetta

Gianni Chiappetta — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 13:46:14 +0000

Thanks Paul, I’ll be referring to this article!

Comment on A rock-solid setup for sending SMTP mail from your EC2 web server by Paul Dowman

Paul Dowman — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 22:28:59 +0000

Ezra: See my “Don’t spoof the From field” section.

Comment on A rock-solid setup for sending SMTP mail from your EC2 web server by Ezra

Ezra — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 21:47:13 +0000

Paul,
Thanks for the excellent article. I’d like to add that AuthSMTP does not allow arbitrary you to set arbitrary “From:” addresses, aka the “header sender address.” Many web applications rely on this, for example, Google Maps. (Get directions, and then click “Send”). AuthSMTP only allows users to set up a limited number of domains that can be in the “From:” field. (http://www.authsmtp.com/auth-smtp/service.html)
According to this chart: http://www.birds-eye.net/article_archive/smtp_mail_relay_services.htm there are other providers that don’t limit the “From:” field.

Comment on A rock-solid setup for sending SMTP mail from your EC2 web server by James Blair

James Blair — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 02:16:29 +0000

You just saved me a bunch of time (again). Thanks!!

Comment on A rock-solid setup for sending SMTP mail from your EC2 web server by Missaka Wijekoon

Missaka Wijekoon — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 08:24:50 +0000

Many thanks for the excellent write up on setting up the postfix config. You saved me many hours of trouble!

Comment on A rock-solid setup for sending SMTP mail from your EC2 web server by Zubair Khan

Zubair Khan — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 19:48:27 +0000

Hi again Paul, FYI, I pointed my application directly to authsmtp.com and was able to send the email. Only that it reached the destination marked [SPAM].
Thanks for your help.

Zubair

Comment on A rock-solid setup for sending SMTP mail from your EC2 web server by Zubair Khan

Zubair Khan — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 19:12:41 +0000

Thanks Paul for the reply, I did like you said, but it seems my script is still trying to use the local mail server. Do I need to start postfix or something? I don’t get an error but I get mail back saying ..
The original message was received at Sat, 5 Jul 2008 15:01:25 -0400
from localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1]
—– The following addresses had permanent fatal errors —–

(reason: 553 http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=75.101.231.205)
—– Transcript of session follows —–
… while talking to smtp.secureserver.net.:
>>> RCPT To:
<<< 553 http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=75.101.231.205
550 5.1.1 … User unknown
Unknown command: “<<<”
& 550: Invalid message number

My apologies for sending you error messages. Just really desperate. The funny thing is, I keep getting these same reply messages even if I use sendmail or smtp.

Thanks again in advance.

Zubair

Comment on A rock-solid setup for sending SMTP mail from your EC2 web server by Paul Dowman

Paul Dowman — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 12:28:23 +0000

Zubair, in your PHP code mail configuration you should use smtp with “localhost” as the server, “25″ as the port (it’s the default so you probably don’t need to specify that) and no username and password. And you don’t need to keep the default main.cf file, you can replace it with what I’ve suggested above or edit it as you like.

Comment on A rock-solid setup for sending SMTP mail from your EC2 web server by Zubair Khan

Zubair Khan — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 04:45:53 +0000

Hi Paul,
I created the AuthSMTP account like you mentioned in your writeup and installed postfix using yum/remi on my fedora 4 EC2. But how do I point my php application to use this setup? My application has the option of a. smtp( server/user/password) b. sendmail (path to sendmail /usr/sbin/sendmail) or phpmail.

Also the default /etc/postfix/main.cf file did not have the below user/password variables like you mentioned.

smtp_connection_cache_destinations = mail.authsmtp.com
smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtp_sasl_password_maps = static:YOUR_AUTHSMPT_USER_ID:YOUR_AUTHSMTP_PW
smtp_sasl_security_options = noanonymous

Any input will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Zubair

Comment on A rock-solid setup for sending SMTP mail from your EC2 web server by Paul Dowman

Paul Dowman — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:28:46 +0000

Alan,

In my case I run postfix on each app server, and the app delivers mail via postfix on localhost because it’s just easier that way (one reason not to might be if you have lots of hosts and you’re exceeding the AuthSMTP’s concurrent connection limit.

But you could use the EC2 firewall rules to allow connections only from your own instances (you should block port 25 to others anyway). You might need to change some settings like mynetworks if you want to relay from other hosts.

Comment on A rock-solid setup for sending SMTP mail from your EC2 web server by Alan

Alan — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:34:36 +0000

Paul, absolutely brilliant.

This was indeed a problem we faced at Amazon EC2, and after doing a little digging your post shone through like a guiding light in the storm.

Thanks for pulling this together.

Quick Question: How are you authorising Postfix to only accept email coming from your other EC2 instances?

Comment on A rock-solid setup for sending SMTP mail from your EC2 web server by BipinDas

BipinDas — Fri, 30 May 2008 08:11:55 +0000

Paul
It was great. This will help a lot.

Comment on A rock-solid setup for sending SMTP mail from your EC2 web server by Bill

Bill — Wed, 28 May 2008 01:45:25 +0000

Terrific post. Just what I was looking for. We recently setup a postfix server on Slicehost, which delivers to Gmail fine, but emails to Yahoo disappear into the ether. I’m not sure what happens with Hotmail since Hotmail won’t let me log in (good grief… how big are they and they still have login bugs?), but I’m going to sign up for AuthSMTP and combined with your config file, I bet that fixes the Yahoo problems.

Comment on A rock-solid setup for sending SMTP mail from your EC2 web server by Tom

Tom — Mon, 05 May 2008 15:31:32 +0000

You. Rock.