O'Reilly Community

Hi

Does this book discuss the problems with sending email successfully from an EC2 instance?

I am currently finding that EC2 is not a solid option since any emails generated by my sites or apps are either being marked as spam or just point blank refused.

I am yet to find a reliable solution for this!

Lewis

Hi,

The book does not discuss sending email from EC2, and I don't believe there is a good solution for doing this without using an external service or email server. The recent announcement of Elastic IP addresses (static-like addresses) might help somewhat, but it is still not possible to configure everything that is necessary to avoid a proportion of the emails sent from EC2 from being flagged as spam.

The best place to look for suggestions and advice on this topic is the EC2 discussion forums, but as far as I'm aware there are still limitations in EC2 that make it ill-suited for email distribution.

Thanks for the reply James. Good luck with the book... I'll be buying a copy!

The basic problem is that dynamic IP's are associated with spam by some lists. You could use something like Dynamic DNS's Mailhop Outbound http://www.dyndns.com/services/mailhop/outbound.html to send email from a known static mailhost. As a low volume email relay, it's been working great for me sending email from my dynamic IP mail computer.

-Dan

The company we use specializes specifically in Amazon ec2 email delivery
http://www.ec2mail.net they are the 800lb gorilla in authenticated email relays. they have really good rates and support, for both low volume and high volume capacities... they are located in equinix facility chicago.. I think they even will assign exclusive ip blocks to your company with the works.. sender_id, reverse Records etc...

This post has been edited by MisterAnderson: May 17 2008, 01:21 AM

I just bought a copy of Programming Amazon Web Services and I must say that its a nice book indeed!

I agree with you that EC2 is not send email successfull.

I find this whole blog extremely interesting, some very thought provoking material.

Dermitage

I'm planning to use a dedicated Certificate Authority for this purpose because it is a closed network - i.e. I'll be using the CA Perl script you get with Open SSL.
Colon Cleanse