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Recently I decided to move to Amazon Web Services and I'm happy with my decision, but I'm not sure if I should outsource the whole email-thing, because it seems to require a considerable administrative effort to keep everything running smooth.

My production servers are running on Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal and I gave iRedMail a shot for a quick mail server setup.

For DNS handling I use Route 53 and created an A Record which points mail.mydomain.com to the Elastic IP of my EC2 instance, which runs the mail server. I also created a MX Record with this value: 10 mail.mydomain.com. – is that config ok?

Sending Mails works like a charm, but I can't receive them.

I have to admit that I'm not really interested how the internals of email delivery work and I'd really appreciate if someone can point me to a good provider for scalable (in- and outbound) email solutions. SendGrid looks really nice and has some big testimonials, but they online care about my outbound traffic.

dom
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This isn't really a shopping site, but if your attitude is that you just want it to work without having to actually work on maintaining it, you definitely need to outsource it to another provider, or move to something like GMail and the Google Apps for business program. Mail isn't a magic thing that just works, there are people who have to monitor it and maintain it and often that means being willing to roll up your sleeves and research how to keep it running despite network issues, configuration issues, spammers and anti-spam efforts.

Seriously. Outsource it.

Bart Silverstrim
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  • The Google Apps for business programm looks great, but it limits the amount of emails I can send per day. We're small at the moment, but I hope this will change in the next mounths, so we may need more than 2000 emails send per day. Do you have a good advice for other providers? – dom Feb 29 '12 at 13:42
  • This is old but this might give insights to some people: you can easily make a setup in which you receive email in gmail and can send both from gmail (for "simple" emails) and any other bulk mail (such as Amazon SES). To receive at gmail, you need to setup MX records on your domain pointing to google's mail servers. To send bulk email "from" your domain through Amazon SES, well, you just send it (after verifying the source address or the source domain through SES console). – Bruno Reis Feb 09 '13 at 02:43