The Blog of Greg

A client recently decided to use Amazon’s Simple Email Service to send email from their website. All the articles I found to set that up involved configuring an stunnel connection to port 465 of the amazon relay host. That seems totally unnecessary to me. So here is what I did:

I added the following to /etc/postfix/main.cf

elayhost = email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com:587
smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/password
smtp_sasl_security_options =
smtpd_sasl_path = smtpd
smtp_sasl_type = cyrus
smtp_tls_security_level = may

Next you need to create the password file (/etc/postfix/password) to enable authentication, the format is:

email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com:587 SMTP_USERNAME:SMTP_PASSWORD

The SMTP_USERNAME and PASSWORD can be obtained by creating them in The AWS console under SES/SMTP.

then create a hash out of it with:

postmap hash /etc/postfix/password < /etc/postfix/password

restart postfix and your mail should now relay through SES