ExpressionEngine and Amazon SES

Question

I am trying to send email from ExpressionEngine using Amazon's Simple Email Service via SMTP and I can't get this working.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/smtp-connect.html provides direction on how to connect. I configured EE3 outgoing email in the following way:

• Server Address: email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
• Server Port: 587 (I've also tried 25)
• Username: [my AWS-provided SMTP user credential]
• Password: [my AWS-provided SMTP user credential]
• Connection Type: STARTTLS (I've also tried SSL and unencrypted)

I've tried all of the port/connection combinations that I can think of. Some of them throw a PHP fsockopen() error. Other times no error is thrown and FreeForm shows a successful submission screen, but SES never got the request to send a message.

What is the correct way to configure EE to work with SES?

Answer 1

I know you're working with EE3, but I've got SES working successfully on all my production sites that run various flavours of EE 2 (2.8.1, 2.10.2). The settings you've listed above are exactly what I have setup in my email configuration.

I'm hoping that my config file should point you in the right direction. Perhaps the email_newline setting is what is missing from your local configuration?

/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Amazon SES
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
*/
$config['email_smtp_crypto'] = 'tls'; // TLS protocol - this needs to be added to each index.php
$config['email_newline'] = "\r\n";  // SES hangs with just \n

Other than that, it's most likely an Amazon SES configuration issue. When you first sign up to use the service, you are placed in a sandbox mode - meaning you can only send and receive from domains you have verified.

Have you verified the domains you are sending from and to?