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How to Send Emails from Amazon EC2: A Guide

As data scientists or software engineers, you may have already encountered scenarios where you need to send automated emails from your server. This could be for notification purposes, sending reports, or communicating with users. In this post, we’ll explore an important topic: how to send emails from Amazon EC2.
By Saturn Cloud | | Miscellaneous

How to Send Emails from Amazon EC2: A Guide

As data scientists or software engineers, you may have already encountered scenarios where you need to send automated emails from your server. This could be for notification purposes, sending reports, or communicating with users. In this post, we’ll explore an important topic: how to send emails from Amazon EC2.

What is Amazon EC2?

Before diving into the how, let’s quickly understand the what. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon’s cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), which provides users with scalable computing capacity. Essentially, EC2 eliminates the need to invest in hardware, making it faster and more cost-efficient to run applications on the cloud.

How to Send Emails from Amazon EC2: The Basics

To send emails from an EC2 instance, we usually use the Simple Email Service (SES) provided by Amazon, a scalable and cost-effective email sending service tailor-made for developers. Note that before starting, you’ll need to have an active AWS account and an EC2 instance running.

Step 1: Verifying Your Email Address with Amazon SES

Amazon SES requires you to verify your email address or domain, to confirm that you own it, and to prevent others from using it. To verify your email:

  1. Navigate to the SES console.
  2. In the left navigation pane, choose ‘Email Addresses’.
  3. Choose ‘Verify a New Email Address’.
  4. Enter the email address you want to verify, and choose ‘Verify This Email Address’.
  5. Amazon will send a verification link to the entered email. Click on the link to complete verification.

Step 2: Requesting Removal of Amazon SES Sending Restrictions

By default, your Amazon SES is in a sandbox environment that has several restrictions. To send an email to unverified email addresses, you need to request a sending limit increase:

  1. Open the Create Case page.
  2. For ‘Limit Type’, choose ‘SES Sending Limits’.
  3. Fill in the rest of the form and choose ‘Submit’.

Step 3: Installing and Configuring a Mail Transfer Agent (MTA)

An MTA is the software that receives, sends, and delivers your emails. Postfix is a popular MTA that’s easy to configure and has a strong community. To install Postfix on your EC2 instance:

sudo yum install postfix
sudo service postfix start
sudo chkconfig postfix on

Then, to configure Postfix to send emails through Amazon SES:

  1. Open /etc/postfix/main.cf in a text editor.
  2. Add or edit the following lines:
relayhost = [email-smtp.<region>.amazonaws.com]:587
smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtp_sasl_security_options = noanonymous
smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
smtp_use_tls = yes
smtp_tls_security_level = encrypt
smtp_tls_note_starttls_offer = yes
  1. Replace <region> with the AWS Region that your Amazon SES is in.

Step 4: Providing Your SMTP Credentials

To authorize your MTA to send email through Amazon SES, you provide your SMTP credentials. Use the following command:

echo '[email-smtp.<region>.amazonaws.com]:587 <SMTP-username>:<SMTP-password>' > /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd

Replace <region>, <SMTP-username>, and <SMTP-password> with your details.

Next, create a Postfix lookup table from the sasl_passwd file:

sudo postmap hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
sudo chown root:root /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd.db
sudo chmod 0600 /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd.db

Finally, restart Postfix:

sudo service postfix restart

And there you have it! You’re now set up to send emails from your Amazon EC2 instance using Amazon SES. This guide was a high-level overview, so remember to delve deeper into each topic for a more comprehensive understanding. Happy emailing!

Keywords: Amazon EC2, Send Emails, Amazon SES, Postfix, SMTP

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