Relaying through Google Apps using Sendmail to bypass EC2 spam blockage

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 14:48:06 +0000

Update 3 May 2011: I’ve subsequently modified our EC2 systems to relay SMTP mail through Amazon’s SES which doesn’t have the 500 messages per day limit that Google Apps does.

A few months ago I moved a site into EC2. I didn’t want to move the existing IMAP server (ugh) so I moved the email to Google Apps. There are only about 10 mailboxes so we went with “Standard” edition (free). Once we completed the move to EC2 we discovered that emails from our webserver were bouncing due to our EC2 IP address being listed in a spam RBL. This sucked, so I looked into relaying the mail from the EC2 webserver through our Google Apps account. Fortunately this turned out to be pretty easy.

Moved my email directly to Google

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:36:16 +0000

For a few years I’ve been funneling my various inboxes directly to my Gmail account. The massive storage, great web UI, and spam filtering made it a no-brainer. I’d basically been relying on a .forward file to do this until a couple of days ago when I signed up with Google Apps for evanhoffman.com, changed the MX records to point to Google, and … all my email still forwards to my Gmail account. But at least Bluehost is out of the loop now. Really, at this point the only reason for me to stay with them is the massive storage quota I have with them for the gallery; but even that doesn’t make much sense with the Picasa web albums stuff. They own Blogger so I assume I could port this whole thing over. Google’s free so I guess I’d save like $100 per year moving everything there, and I mostly only use it for email anyway. I think I’m paying like $8/month… With thin-provisioned disk space they could drop that to like $3/month probably and still make $.

Gmail on Evan Hoffman

Relaying through Google Apps using Sendmail to bypass EC2 spam blockage

Moved my email directly to Google