Ralph Weber <roweber@ieee.org> wrote:
I am moving the website www.t10.org from a private/corporate VM to AWS EC2s.
For many years, t10.org has had very happy results with using Mailman 2 for its email reflector, and I have no real concerns about moving to Mailman 3. My bugbear is the fact that I need the following mixed bag of incoming email addresses to work in concert with each other to receive and handle emails.
[...]
My best guess is that the AWS Simple Email Service (SES) needs to sit in front of both Mailman and the home-grown code, to properly direct the incoming emails to the right places. The big worry is as follows...
Why do you believe that is the case? In your current setup your mail server acts as primary MX, the server runs an MTA with an interface to Mailman. Why would you believe this to be different in the AWS environment?
All available evidence read to date suggests that the default AWS installation of Mailman 3 assumes that Mailman 3 is the *only* receiver of emails in the configuration. If true, then putting SES in front of Mailman could be a Herculean challenge.
Which instructions are these?
When I read about using Mailman on AWS, my experience is that getting email into the system is fine because AWS allows incoming connections on port 25, and so long as you have a static public IP address attached to the instance that routes traffic correctly incoming mail is fine. The challenge is with outbound mail from your server, as directly sending outbound email from AWS IP addresses is an issue because the AWS Ips are listed on many spam lists as spammers have been known to set up instances and abuse them by sending out bulk mail. Sending outbound emails via the SES service from Mailman is possible, but it comes with some caveats due to the way that SES validates email addresses on the platform. Some users have been able to get it working on this list, but have had to put the lists into an anonymous mode where the email of the sender is obfuscated so as not to trip up SES.
For this reason I haven't moved my Mailman instances onto the public cloud, I instead use a VPS provider who's Ips have a good sending reputation. I am still interested in doing this work however, just need to work out the best option for sending out the email effectively.
Thanks. Andrew.