How to setup email with AWS Lightsail

Supergogoman91 picture Supergogoman91 · Feb 2, 2018 · Viewed 12.3k times · Source

I've recently hosted my wordpress website through AWS Lightsail. The site has a contact form and a newsletter, but neither are working. I'm also unable to send a password reset email through wordpress, receiving a message that the host may have disabled the mail() function.

How do I setup email on my website? Is it handled through the domain or the host? I've read that I may need to sign up for AWS SES, however I'm unsure how to proceed. My client has also informed me that they have Outlook 365 setup for the domain, but I'm unsure where that fits in.

Apologies for the vagueness. I'm new to hosting websites online, and have been unable to find any useful tutorials/resources so any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer

codeymcgoo picture codeymcgoo · Feb 2, 2018

I would suggest not hosting your client's email through your Lightsail server. There are a lot of extra headaches to consider and there are other services that are more reliable and offer a better more robust user interface than the options available on server.

To get your client a custom domainname email address (ie [email protected]) here are two options:

Zoho - Cost: FREE

You can sign up here: https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html?src=zmail You need to verify the domain name for this to work (either by adding an HTML file to the site or a CNAME to the domain)

GSuite by Google - Cost: $5/user/month

You can sign up here: https://inbox.google.com/u/0/search/google%20suite#m_-1052842142248281614_ You can also get some good promotional codes to get 20% off the first year - here's one: 9746YLRVNWERPAH

And, to your question about making sure forgot password emails are sent, make sure sendmail is installed on the server (apt-get install sendmail), that the /etc/hosts file contains the following

  • 127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.localdomain yourhostnamehere

and that port 25 is open on the server.