ec2 - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud tips and howtos
Mail server in the cloud
Amazon ec2 is an excellent stage for servers,
and mail servers fits in very well.
Here is a quick guide on setting up a mail server
and on demand backup mx as well in the cloud.
Pre requisits
Two howtos in one:
Mail server
Instead of duplicating howtos,
follow my How to set up a mail server on a GNU / Linux system instead.
Backup mail server
If as above you can follow my How to set up a mail server on a GNU / Linux system, then there is a extention section
on how to set up backup mx servers.
This section will be extended to show how to set this up
without the local delivery, without IMAP etc, thus a true backup mx.
Amazon ec2 Mail issues
Having mail servers in the cloud of Amazon ec2 does have a couple of issues.
-
Spammers set up mail spamming instances in the ec2 cloud.
Thus the ec2 ips are blocked by some spam checking tools.
In the postfix howto document I tell you how to unlist your public ip.
Basically go to spamhaus.org
and fill their unlisting forms.
-
Amazon have themselves set up restrictions for this.
Thus port 25 traffic of new AWS accounts are restricted.
Follow the advice in
their article on how to
be approved.
-
Thirdly, if you are in the cloud, your mail server is not local.
So if you sent 50MB files as attachment to someone else,
the transfer will take awhile compared to a local mail server.