Cloud Tips: Amazon EC2 & Rejected Email

A few weeks ago I’ve setup my email in the /etc/aliases for user root (and the others) and started to actually read my root email from time to time (I wonder why I never did that before). Anyways, what bugged me straight away is that I had some rejected emails that were not being delivered, yielding the following errors (I removed some numbers):

Deferred: 450 4.7.1 : Helo command rejected: Host not found
421 invalid sender domain 'domU.compute-1.internal' (misconfigured dns?)

And some others that looked alike. Tonnes of them, every four hours! The emails to other addresses were delivered fine though. I had WordPress notification messages delivered to my email, never lost a message. I also tried sending out a few using the mail command via SSH, everything okay. For a second I thought that maybe those addresses were simply invalid, but wouldn’t the server reply with an “Invalid recepient” error? Probably.. Here’s what I got from the Amazon Web Services support forums:

It seems that some remote mail servers complain about your server
identifying itself in the SMTP dialogue as domU.compute-1.internal,
while its external name is ec2.compute-1.amazonaws.com

Makes total sense. Perhaps some servers do try to see where the e-mail is coming from and of course the .internal domain is unresolvable (thus the “dns” misconfiguration error). I had to identify myself with an external, resolvable name. So I copied the external name into the /etc/mailname file and hmm.. Well, it’s been a week now and I haven’t received anymore delivery errors, so that must have worked.