Hi Marius,

Thanks for sharing your plans - to be honest I think you are going about this the wrong way.

I would recommend putting a local mta (exim/postfix) on your EC2 instance and configure that to send mail to SES. There seem to be a few gudies out there about configuring postfix/exim to do this if you google around. Then configure Moodle to talk plain old smtp to your local mailserver. This has the advantage of your local server doing the right thing if it can't contact the amazon service.

I recommend this sort of setup for any resonable sized moodle site in any case because it just allows moodle to fire off the emails and forget whilst the mta does its job of managing the email delivery.

I don't think there would be much interest in seeing this core for that reason (moodle just sends emails with plain old SMTP)

cheers,
Dan

I tried several approaches recomended by others - all worked to a point but had one drawback or another. 

Finally hit upon using emailrelay which is a simple SMTP relay.  Very simple to set up and works perfectly. 

yum -y install openssl-devel

Download source for emailrelay,  and compile with openssl so the encrypted connection to SES will work. 

./configure --with-openssl

make & make install

I put my SES SMTP credentials (not amazon aws keys) into a file: eg /etc/amazon-ses as a single line thus: 

login client <username> <password>

Then run email relay as service using the following... 

/usr/local/sbin/emailrelay --as-server --port 10025 --spool-dir /tmp/spool --poll 30 --forward-to email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com:587 --client-tls --client-auth /etc/amazon-ses --spool-dir /tmp/spool

This will listen on port 10025 for incoming SMTP reqests, spool them to /tmp/spool and every 30 seconds attempt to send them through to amazon SES for delivery. Of course changing these settings is trivial. 

In centos I put this in /etc/rc.d/rc.local so it runs at startup. Check your machine is firewalled so external connections to port 10025 are not permitted. 

Then, within Moodle, I set up the email plugin to use SMTP address 127.0.0.1:10025 and no authentication details. 

One gotcha is that Moodle uses the 'support contact' email address as the sender (not the no-reply address), so this MUST be an address verified through your SES account with amazon. 

One of this benefits of this approach is that your Moodle PHP can 'send' email almost instantly - there is no pause waiting for SSL handshaking with a distant machine - and the emails are then spooled to be sent in an orderly way using a different process. 

This approach will also work with Gmail and avoids any core hacks. It only takes ten minutes to set up and seems rock solid (so far). 

My machine is on Amazon EC2 and Apache is Chrooted which created challenges for communicating with local MTA (no localhost).  

Hope it helps...

I have been working with Amazon EC2 based Moodles this semester and have been happy with everything until it hit the mail!

I used Jango SMTP for a while, they had a nice mail relay service, and very little effort was envolved. 

But being hosted on the Amazon, I wanted to change over to the SES. And after a little head banging, I managed to get it working!

Here is what I've done:

1. Signed up for the SES and created the auth key pair needed.

2. I decided to go with one email address that will be used for email, so I verified the email address I wanted to use with the SES.

3. Just for kicks I verified the domain also, which wasn't needed. Just by chance I may need it later.

4. Add the details to the Plugins -> Message Outputs -> Email.

The address I used was email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com:587

This has the port number for TLS.

5. I enabled TLS and added the username and password auth details.

6. I updated the reply to address, to the one I verified.

7. Then I went to the support email address and updated it (admin/settings.php?section=supportcontact) to the verified email also. This is very important because this is the address things are often sent from!)

 

And then It was ready to roll!

Another little pointer was, ensure you have your cron set up, because things like the forum post emails rely on this!

 

- Kyle.

I've been running Moodle on AWS for nearly 2 years, and email was the biggest headache until I discovered Critsend email relay service. It's not free, but incredibly cheap (and you get 50,000 mails for free to start you off). It will take you about 5 minutes to get Moodle on AWS setup to use critsend, and you get useful reports and statistics too (e.g. how many users open the emails sent).

We've used them for 2 years now, sent about 500,000 emails and not had any problems.

I wanted to use SES to keep it all in AWS, but it won't send on behalf of others, only on authorised email addresses - which isn't very suitable for Moodle.