Cloud Tips: Amazon EC2 Email & S3 CNAME Issues

So you moved your blog or website (or whatever) to Amazon EC2 and wondering why your e-mail notices have stopped working? Now I know there’s bunch of articles about the EC2 email issues, and most of them state that the letters are getting into the spam boxes or aren’t getting delivered at all, because Amazon’s IP pool has been blacklisted by most e-mail providers.

Don’t panic! Not just yet.. You might as well try the postfix via google mail or perhaps some paid mail relay servers, but hey, the php mail function requires the sendmail daemon to be running, and if you’re using the Fedora Core 8 AMI on EC2, you might as well try to turn it on:

service sendmail start

Worked for me, and the messages aren’t being marked as spam, while I’m still getting messages from my WordPress installation on MediaTemple marked as Junk by Windows Live Mail ;) I don’t believe Amazon’s in the blacklists… Really… Anyone, but not Amazon .. Right?

The next AWS issue a novice is going to bump into is the CNAME dillema. It’s so straightforward though, really… Let’s say I want an S3 bucket on s3.foller.me instead of the good old s3.amazonaws.com address. Create a new bucket called s3.foller.me, go to your DNS editor and add a CNAME record for s3.foller.me pointing to s3.foller.me.s3.amazonaws.com. Done. The bucket name and the CNAME have to be the same and this is the one and only trick.

Happy clouding, cheers!

About the author

Konstantin Kovshenin

WordPress Core Contributor, ex-Automattician, public speaker and consultant, enjoying life in Moscow. I blog about tech, WordPress and DevOps.

1 comment

  • Thank you for posting the great tip! Worked for me too!

    I look forward to trying your other tips.