Send emails from AWS EC2 instance (SES mandatory?)

ruby-on-rails amazon-web-services amazon-ec2 amazon-ses
Rober picture Rober · May 23, 2014 · Viewed 22.3k times · Source

I write this post just to see if I can get some clarifications regarding email sending concepts in an AWS EC2 instance.

This is related with this other post Rails does not send emails on AWS

I´m developing a Rails application that sends emails to customers (such as confirmation or information emails).

I dont know exactly which email service is using Rails. I didn´t install any particular gem. But the emails are been sent perfectly in development environment (Ubuntu).

When I deploy to my production environment (AWS EC2 instance). This functionality is not working. You can see the error details in the post I provided above. The error is related with some smtp connection refused.

So, I have read some other posts but Im confused. Is it mandatory to use the AWS SES service in order to send emails from EC2 instance? Or it is just a problem related to security credentials (maybe I just need to open the smtp 25 port). Do I need to install any email client or server?

Answer

Sébastien Stormacq picture Sébastien Stormacq · May 23, 2014

Sending emails from EC2 instances is limited by Amazon and strictly throttled at network level. This is to prevent spamming and other abuses.

If you have a large amount of emails to send to your customers, the recommended way is to use Amazon Simple Email Service. With Amazon SES, you can send transactional email, marketing messages, or any other type of high-quality content and you only pay for what you use.

If you really need to send emails from an EC2 instance, you must use an Elastic IP Adress and ask Amazon's support to remove limitations on SMTP traffic from that EIP. The form to contact us is available at https://portal.aws.amazon.com/gp/aws/html-forms-controller/contactus/ec2-email-limit-rdns-request (authentication is required)

Seb

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