HN Explorer

Ask HN: How do you send mails from Amazon EC2?

8 points by maconic ↗ HN
I'm using Amazon EC2 to host a web server, but Amazon EC2's IP address space is blocked by Trend Micro MAPS DUL (http://securecloud.com/help/en/about_the_dul.html). Given that sending emails from a web server is often necessary, I need a way to send emails from the web server. I was using the Google Apps SMTP server for this until our website had enough users that we passed the Google Apps daily email limit. So now I'm looking for an alternative way to send emails. I'm sure many other YC News readers have encountered this... any suggestions?

Clarification: I don't mean email marketing services like ConstantContact.com but rather mail servers that can be used directly from our web server to send email notifications.

9 comments

[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 34.2 ms ] thread
RobGR
What you really need is an smtp relay, on a fixed IP, carefully configured to relay only from your hosts and on a reputable block of IP addresses.

That is entirely possible. The server itself does not have to be very extreme, the lowest end Rackspace cloud or Godaddy server should do it, it all just comes down to if those IP addresses are blocked too.

The real problem is that you will spend too much time figuring out reverse DNS, SPF records, and all kind of email trivia. I'm not sure it's really worth it. How many customers do you lose if you just ignore the problem ?

If you can't just ignore the problem, get a host on a reputable block of IPs and hire a freelance sys admin to set up and baby the system. You will want to monitor bounce rates and other metrics and fix problems as they arise.

jsatok
I was seeing a relatively high (30% or so) open rate on emails, but knew there was a deliverability problem because friends and family were reporting not getting my daily emails (my site automatically sends out an email every day at 9am). I'm now using SendGrid, getting an open rate of over 50% (yeah, it's nuts!), and I don't need to worry about DNS, SPF, etc. I highly recommend SendGrid.
wrs
If you're willing to risk going over a vague TOS restriction (no "excessive" usage), try fusemail.com.

If you want to pay for certainty, some standard SMTP services are: Sendgrid, AuthSMTP, fastmail.fm.

[dead] papyromancer
I remember having a problem with this when I set up an ec2 instance. I don't have any links handy (it was over a year ago), but I remember getting some helpful responses from gmail when my server attempted to send mail to their users. Something about being Greylisted or maybe I'm remembering that it came through in my postgrey logs.

The best I can remember for my solution was to get an elastic ip, then fill out some forms with a watchlist organization, and add some fancy txt records to my dns.

A couple days later emails were going out fine.

Sorry I can't be more specific, but it was one of those things that hat me beating my head against a wall for a few days, and after a few days of the steep learning curve for sending email the number of things I tried vastly exceeded the number of things that worked, so my notes are of little help.

bhiggins
We have Postini already, so we decided to relay through them. Also, I noticed that my emails were blocked before I had an elastic IP, but after I got an elastic IP address they weren't. YMMV.