Sending Mails from Amazon EC2 Instance (The cheapest way)

During the past weeks we have decided to use Amazon EC2 instance as a host for SharePoint demo environment in order to get it accessible everywhere and separate it from our internal network.

One challenge we have faced during that is the sending of email from our SharePoint using normal outgoing email setting.

We have tried various SMTP servers to send emails but it doesn’t work, after a lot of searching over the internet we have reached that this is a restriction on Amazon EC2 instances.

If you try to send directly you might as well forget about guaranteed delivery. A large amount of your email will end up in spam folders if it is even delivered at all.

There are a few problems with delivering email from Ec2

• MX record will not map to your IP and you are using dynamic IPs (you can address this with elastic IP's) adding a SPF DNS record can help as well
• Reverse DNS will map back to Amazon and not back to your Hostname
• Many of the Ec2 IP's have been blacklisted due to abusers of the service sending spam.

Reference http://www.bpurcell.org/blog/index.cfm?entry=1125&mode=entry

We have decide to use the Google apps approach according to the above article, the configurations is very straight forward just follow the same steps mentioned here only change the account you use from Gmail to google apps email so instead of myaccount@gmail.com use myaccount@your_company_at_googleapps.com