CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi. I've read through a number of different posts here on this forum without luck. Is there anyone who has successfully setup Amazon SES for CiviCRM on version 4.4 (or likely 4.3 works too)? We just upgraded from 4.1.6 > 4.4.1 and my understanding is SES should now be fully supported. Simply setting the SMTP server to the address and credentials required gives and error message everytime.

An error occurred when CiviCRM attempted to send an email (via SMTP). If you received this error after submitting on online contribution or event registration - the transaction was completed, but we were unable to send the email receipt.
The mail library returned the following error message:
authentication failure [SMTP: Invalid response code received from SMTP server while sending email. This is often caused by a misconfiguration in Outbound Email settings. Please verify the settings at Administer CiviCRM >> Global Settings >> Outbound Email (SMTP). (code: 530, response: Must issue a STARTTLS command first)]

My settings...

SMTP Server: email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
SMTP Port: 25
Authentication: Yes
SMTP Username: xxx (as provided by Amazon)
SMTP Password: yyy (as provided by Amazon)

Is there something more that must be done? I've tried the other ports as well (587, 465). SES is configured to work with the domain, etc.

Setting the port to 587 gives the same error message. Adding ssl:// as I've seen mentioned in other posts to the front of the url gives this error:

Failed to connect to ssl://email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com:587 [SMTP: Failed to connect socket: fsockopen(): unable to connect to ssl://email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com:587 (Unknown error) (code: -1, response: )]

Appears to be a firewall issue. I edited /etc/postfix/master.cf to enable SSL over port 465. The following settings now work:

SMTP Server: ssl://email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
SMTP Port: 465
Authentication: Yes

Are there any other issues or configurations I need to be concerned with for Amazon SES? Transaction mail sends now, but will CiviMail have any issues?

Thanks for that post. I'll follow it and chime in if / when we see problems.

We have not yet changed the default throttle rate settings introduced in 4.3. What would a good recommendation specifically for Amazon SES?

Current Settings:
Mailer Batch Limit: 200
Mailer Throttle Time: 0
Mailer Job Size: 0
Mailer Cron Job Limit: 0

Also, the CRON Job is set to run every 15 minutes currently.

I'm reviewing this post here, but http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php?topic=1282.0), but no details pertaining to Amazon SES specifically. On a side note, it would be great if we could create a Wiki post specifically for Amazon SES (and other popular providers) with "recommended" settings.

I've modified the settings to these default as no one seems to have a suggestion / best recommendation:

Current Settings:
Mailer Batch Limit: 500
Mailer Throttle Time: 500000
Mailer Job Size: 0
Mailer Cron Job Limit: 0

Cronjob is set to run every 15 minutes.

My understanding is these settings will send 2 emails per second (my current max on SES is 5) up to 500 per batch. If my typical mass email is 4,000 users, it would complete in 2 hours.