CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi, just a follow up since my last post, as I received an inquiry from a potential client asking me about SES integration.  In short - I've given up on AWS SES+Postfix, I had nothing but trouble with implementing it.  It would work for a few hundred e-mails, then go belly-up when I sent out 2,000+ emails, with most of those I assume, going in to an email black hole. The queuing/per minute limit of SES was killing my messages and deliverability, and very frustrating to work with.

I have used the newer Amazon SES/SMTP which was much easier to configure CiviCRM with SMTP credentials, avoiding the Postfix integration altogether. Still the reporting was minimal and I just didn't like AWS SES/SMTP, it was not very user friendly in my opinion.

Then along came Mandrill by MailChimp a few months ago - http://blog.mailchimp.com/public-beta-of-mandrill-smtp-email-service/. This was a godsend for me as a freelance developer/one-man webshop, and has made my life easier. The biggest reason is that, though Mandrill and SendGrid have initial sending limits of 200 message per hour for example - both of these services handle the spooling/queue for you! So CiviCRM can blast out 2,000 emails in one shot, then Mandrill will send those messages out over how ever many hours, 200 each hour, until they are all delivered. That alone is worth moving away from SES to Mandrill or SendGrid.

I've migrated 7 of my clients to Mandrill, and couldn't be happier with the service.  I also used SendGrid for a few months too - they also have excellent SMTP deliverability and statistics, as well they're very affordable - less then $1 per month for most of my clients sending a few thousand e-mails per month.

Bottom line - if you want the easiest setup via SMTP for CiviCRM go with Mandrill or SendGrid. If you send less than 12,000 e-mails per month, Mandrill is free. Personally I'm not planning on using Amazon SES again after using these other services that offer so many features for such a low cost.  I've also moved all of my hosting off of AWS and on to HPCloud.

Lastly - I did not sign-up directly with Mandrill, I found it best to sign-up for Mandrill through MailChimp - first creating a free MailChimp account, then activating the Mandrill service for the MailChimp account through the Account > Extras > Integrations menu.  Hope this helps someone in the future.

--Tony

I can't find anything in the AWS SES documentation that places any limits on From: addresses. However if each client is hosting different sites on different domains - my personal preference would be to set them up each with their own AWS account, I wouldn't operate several clients under just 1 AWS/SES account, though you could if you wanted to just to get started experimenting.

Yes, you can now verify multiple email addresses from different domains for use with SES. I just prefer to keep each client's domain on separate accounts for logistical reasons.

Another update, that if you are using Amazon SES - CiviCRM 4.2 does now support throttling: http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-9698

Hi,

mandrill is for transactional emails, ie. small volume, that's a different aim than amazon SES/sendgrid/civismtp...

I think each of these providers re-invented a different way to handle bounces, and possibly sending too (because smtp isn't good enough it seems), so it probably makes sense a separate extensions.

Don't think they have been a lot of traction to actually make this extension happen, let's see if your push is what is needed to get a wider (financial) support....

X+

So are you suggesting that whereas SES can do transactional - that facility is not required for most CiviCRM purposes - and would therefore add an unnecessary layer of complexity (and cost?) to what is needed?

I'm afraid you are over-reading me, I was simply not aware Amazon SES was presenting itself as both transactional and bulk

The transactional emails sent from Civi aren't automatically managed for bounces, ie. if you register to an event with an invalid email, it won't automatically flag it as such in civi (nor the participant status updated). Having a better tracking of that would be useful and is missing.

As for the opening rate of mass mailing, I found it roughly similar to external solutions after properly configured and the IP address "approved"... but properly configure it (SPF, DKIM, reverse DNS...) is probably more work than most sites are willing to put.

So both type of emails might benefit having an external solution, those like sendgrid and amazon that offers to handle both sounds like an interesting option.

X+

This topic is old, but it's still the top link for "Amazon SES CiviCRM" in Google, so:
I have some pretty decent documentation here:
https://hq.palantetech.coop/projects/commons/wiki/Amazon_SES_for_CiviCRM

This conversation has been continued on Stack Exchange here:
http://civicrm.stackexchange.com/questions/694/does-civimail-smtp-work-with-amazon-aws-ses