AWS outgoing email problems
Posted by Barry Rowlingson on October 30, 2012
OJS is trying to send emails to people registered on the journal and failing for some. I think it is spam blocking at the receiving end. I can set my email to barry.rowlingson@gmail.com and it works fine, change it to b.rowlingson@lancaster.ac.uk and I see errors in the sendmail log. Similar errors occur for Barend and Franz-Josef.
Some googling implies this is because amazon is a massive source of spam, but could also be a misconfig in sendmail (some would say using sendmail over postfix is a misconfig) so I've asked the lancaster.ac.uk admins if they can nail down why my email was rejected. An online testing service seems to think the host is "greylisted".
Solutions seem to involve using another amazon service (SES) or a third-party SMTP server but I don't have time for this. Can we stick it all on OSGeo servers?
Some googling implies this is because amazon is a massive source of spam, but could also be a misconfig in sendmail (some would say using sendmail over postfix is a misconfig) so I've asked the lancaster.ac.uk admins if they can nail down why my email was rejected. An online testing service seems to think the host is "greylisted".
Solutions seem to involve using another amazon service (SES) or a third-party SMTP server but I don't have time for this. Can we stick it all on OSGeo servers?
Comments
Jo Cook on October 30, 2012:
What does "stick it all on OSGeo servers" imply, exactly?
Thanks
Jo
Barry Rowlingson on October 30, 2012:
Maybe Wordpress is less of an issue, since it shouldn't have to send so
many emails out. Maybe we leave that on Amazon if you are worried about
shifting it.
Barry
Jo Cook on October 30, 2012:
The problem with that idea is that we've not had much of a response about moving anything onto the OSGeo servers, and I certainly can't personally see myself having any time to do a full-scale move over for the next week or so at least. How important is it that we resolve this issue today? Can other elements of the packages be evaluated in the mean-time?
My personal feeling is that the most important things for us to resolve this week are the logo- so we can get the design cracked on with next week. and getting Steven's sponsorship document up on the site (which I hope to do after lunch).
Jo
Barry Rowlingson on October 30, 2012:
don't want to do a bunch of setup here and then redo on another server.
We'll do what we can with the system as is (ie broken) but we can't make
the system live for submissions until we've tested the review process, and
that needs working emails.
Also, Naomi has been in touch about file formats for the logo, she uses
Adobe Illustrator but I've asked for SVG and AI files so we can try both.
Barry Rowlingson on October 30, 2012:
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/03/reverse-dns-for-ec2s-elastic-ip-addresses.html
is that something quick you can try? I'm not even sure what the reverse DNS
should go to...
Jo Cook on October 30, 2012:
I really can't do anything until Monday at the earliest- I'm preparing for a seminar tomorrow (then out again with a client on Friday, which I also need to prepare for). All I can say is that if any of this is so urgent it can't wait until Monday, then someone else will have to take responsibility for it. However, I can, and will, block out some time on Monday to deal with things, be that moving it to a different host, or figuring out the issue with the email.
Jo
Barry Rowlingson on October 30, 2012:
all morning to get a handle on this. I've even considered ditching sendmail
for postfix on the host, but that might solve nothing with a small
probability of breaking everything.
Back to working on a talk that needs delivering by 10am tomorrow...
Jo Cook on October 30, 2012:
Are you able to visit the page linked from that aws blog post- the one at https://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/html-forms-controller/contactus/ec2-email-limit-rdns-request?
Not sure if you can get to it without an aws account. Anyhow, it seems to suggest we can apply to have the limits changed- and also provide them with a reverse dns record, so I've filled it in and we'll see what they say...
Jo
Barry Rowlingson on October 30, 2012:
already - and it would probably let me add more amazon hosts and max out
your credit card.
I'll give it a day or so and try again - now I see lancaster.ac.uk failing
I have a [fairly] reproducible example.
thanks
Barry
Jo Cook on October 30, 2012:
Barry Rowlingson on November 2, 2012:
I had to set the hostname to 2013.foss4g.org, and possibly some other settings. I now get emails okay, as does Barend and Franz-Josef. I suspect Antony may start getting notifications from WordPress about comments and so on.
If you can, go to http://2013.foss4g.org/ojs and get yourself a login, let me know if you get an authentication message.
Steven Feldman on November 5, 2012: