CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'd *very* much like to see Amazon SES incorporated, for the record. Is anybody out there working or planning to work on this?

Hi, I've been using SES SMTP with CiviCRM for a few weeks now.  I have found it best, if you have server-level root access, to configure your postfix server for use with SES/SMTP.  There is a very informative webinar which covers this topic in detail step-by-step.

AWS SES SMTP Webinar (EC2+SMTP instructions start at 17:10 - 21:00)

And Duo Consulting has documented the steps they've found to work with SES/SMTP here:
Using Amazon’s SES with Postfix as a smarthost forwarder

The major concern with using SES/SMTP directly (with a username/password auth from an application) is that you'll encounter issues and bounces with the e-mail per second limit.  Currently, at the lowest level SES I've been using, the limit is 5 e-mails per second/10,000 per day.  If your application (CiviCRM or other) sends a barrage of 100 e-mails per second - SES SMTP will bounce those that exceed the threshold of 5 e-mails per second.  This limit is OK for use with your personal Outlook e-mail client (which they cover in the first part of the webinar).  But it is for this reason that it's best in my option to configure postfix as a relay for SES SMTP.  This way postfix is a buffer between your application and SES, so postfix will spool, delay, and retry sending the e-mails, and send them at a reasonable rate over time that will comply with the 5 per second limit.  Otherwise, if not using the postfix relay method, it is the application's responsibility to throttle back the e-mail per second send rate. 

While it would be awesome to just plug-in the SMTP credentials in CiviCRM directly, as that would be hugely beneficial for those on shared servers (without root access to postfix), I'm not a coder and don't know what it would take to have CiviCRM handle TLS and e-mail per second limits?

For now this postfix relay method is working very well for me - and my AWS bill has been less than any shared host, but I've been a hardcore server admin since Red Hat 4.x days (15+ years) so this level of configuration doesn't scare me .  I've been running a non-profit website on an EC2 instance for the past 18 months.  I was paying for an outside SMTP relay service because cloud/EC2 e-mail was unreliable and often blacklisted.  Now with SES/SMTP I am running this site on a FREE EC2 instance, with a 10,000 e-mail per day limit for this non-profit of about 1,000 members.  And it's only costing about $2 per month, and that's just because I have a few gigs of EBS volumes stored as backup. AWS+EC+SES/SMTP=WIN!

-- Tony

We have been using CiviSMTP for several years and are generally happy with the service but it's always a good thing to look at alternatives. Has there been any progress on this?

One driving factor for us is that we are about to shift our production environment to EC2 and there may be some benefits to switching from CiviSMTP. Like I said, CiviSMTP has been good for us and service would outweigh cost in making a decision to move.

Integrating AWS SES and CiviCRM has been a big disappointment.   We use Google Apps, but because of the 500 email limit we were hoping to integrate AWS SES with CiviCRM to save money.

We were using VPS.Net service with CiviCRM and setting up email took some time but nothing like integrating with SES which has taken us weeks and we still are not able to send mail.

Of course now we are trying to get a mailing out about our upcoming event and we are stuck...  I would recommend that you not try to get SES to work with CiviCRM when you are under an event deadline!

We have set up an Ubuntu server to implement Postfix are seeing mail being completed using the SES console (so we know we are doing something right), but now are working to set up Crontabs to meet Amazon's 5 per second rule instead of trying to figure out how to create a wrapper...

Neither of us setting up Drupal or AWS are employed as programmers or consultants -- simply two volunteers trying to set up a non profit to build a disability community.

It seems like there should be more complete instructions integrate SES into Civimail.

This document was some what helpful evanhoffman.com/evan/2011/04/28/integrating-amazon-simple-email-service-with-postfix-for-smarthost-relaying/

Webinar also helpful youtube.com/watch?v=1jEmL0UYQ5M&feature=youtu.be

But it would be soooooo helpful if someone at CiviCRM could make this process easier for us as many of us are small non profits --

There must be something that could document how to integrate Civicrm and Amazon SES?   Even better would be a module that might make this process easier?

Best,

Lori

Might want to use CiviSMTP: http://civismtp.com/drupal/

It is quite cheap and they provide excellent service. It definitely helps the ecosystem and the community to buy and support "local" services

lobo

Hi,

CiviMail uses a different email for each mail sent to be able to track the bounces.

http://cr.yp.to/proto/verp.txt

If you put a prefix on your mailbox configuration (test+) you might be lucky and get it working.

Otherwise, it will need changes on civimail to work with SES.

X+

An update. After providing the Localpart settings to CiviMail, Amazon SES accepts the VERP email address.

My configuration is having the following...

(i) Amazon SES verified email address - members@example.com
(ii) Amazon SES verified emaill address - civimail@example.com
(iii) Applied my patch at http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php?topic=21583.0
(iv) CiviMail Mail Accounts applied Localpart "civimail+"
(v) Postfix + SES setup by following http://blog.duoconsulting.com/2012/01/30/using-amazons-ses-with-postfix-as-a-smarthost-forwarder/
(vi) stunnel4 setup by following http://www.stefanolocati.it/blog/?p=737

And now, I can send a email from members@example.com, and its VERP email address (the envelope MAIL FROM header) is civimail+b.63.84.09b96f7c436bf3b7@example.com. It seems that Amazon SES loves the "civimail+" prefix.