

Ask YC : Emailing from Amazon EC2 Instance - donna

Emailing from Amazon EC2 Instance<p>Experiencing long delays between sending email directly from an EC2 instance, using stock Postfix from Amazon FC Core 8 small AMI.<p>Elastic IP should fix the objection about lack of fixed IP address, and our IP address is not on any spam blacklists.<p>Any ideas?<p>Thanks
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cperciva
Don't send email directly from an EC2 instance. Even if you have a fixed IP
address.

It sucks, but if you do send email directly from EC2, you'll run into (a)
idiots like godaddy who block all email originating from EC2, and (b) spam
filters which check reverse DNS, see that the reverse DNS is basically just
the IP address spelled out, and (incorrectly) conclude that it must be a
dynamic IP address.

Regardless of what problems you're experiencing right now, if you want to
avoid problems in the future I recommend paying for an SMTP relay like
authsmtp.com (not a personal recommendation -- I've never used them, but lots
of people on the AWS EC2 web forum recommend them).

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donna
thanks that is extremely helpful, I think you've hit the nail on the head.

this might sound cheesy, but for a temporary kluge what would you think of
setting up a mail rely behind a home DSL connection?

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davidu
Even worse. Use an SMTP gateway or just buy a dedicated server somewhere...

