XF 1.1 Amazon SES With Xenforo

TheBigK

TheBigK

Well-known member
Yesterday, I stumbled upon Amazon SES which now has SMTP gateway. I'm planning to use it with Xenforo to handle all the emails; so that the delivery is always right. I, however have basic questions -
  • To the best of my knowledge, I only need to enter the SMTP settings provided by Amazon in 'Email Options' in XF ACP. Is that enough?
  • Can I use it to send notifications or monthly newsletter to all the members who have opted to receive emails from administrator? Would that be spamming? We've over 90k members who've opted to receive emails from admins; but my estimate is that 10-20k of them aren't active. We didn't have 'email' verification enabled in our earlier days.
Thank you for your time in advance :)
 
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TheBigK said:
To the best of my knowledge, I only need to enter the SMTP settings provided by Amazon in 'Email Options' in XF ACP. Is that enough?
Click to expand...

Yep. That's it.

TheBigK said:
Can I use it to send notifications or monthly newsletter to all the members who have opted to receive emails from administrator? Would that be spamming? We've over 90k members who've opted to receive emails from admins; but my estimate is that 10-20k of them aren't active. We didn't have 'email' verification enabled in our earlier days.
Click to expand...

Yes. The mass mailer goes through the SMTP server:

Admin CP -> Users -> Email Users

It's spam only if your users think it's unsolicited.
 
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Jake Bunce said:
It's spam only if your users think it's unsolicited.
Click to expand...
Hi Jake;
Thank you for your quick response. My concern is, XenForo will try to send all the mail at once (in my case, with select newsgroups the number is 50k) and not sure whether it's *right* to send that volume in one go. What do you think? I read Amazon SES documentation but couldn't find a mention of how many emails I can send.

How does XF handle the bulk mail send? Especially when I'm using external mail server?
 
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Possible Bug!

I switched to SMTP in email options and entered the SMTP details provided by Amazon. I've double checked username/password & server settings and everything is right. After switching to SMTP; if I start a conversation; the conversation does not get stored (the loader keeps on rotating). Server error log shows -

Code: 
Zend_Mail_Protocol_Exception: Could not read from email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com - library/Zend/Mail/Protocol/Abstract.php:385

Can someone check? Is it just a simple time-out?
 
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The SMTP connection is failing. Conversations can send out email notifications which is why the submission is lagging on that error.

You need to confirm the SMTP info. That's all.
 
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Jake Bunce said:
The SMTP connection is failing. Conversations can send out email notifications which is why the submission is lagging on that error.

You need to confirm the SMTP info. That's all.
Click to expand...
SMTP settings are perfect. Amazon provides all the settings for SMTP that I can directly enter into the XF email options. I've triple checked; but doesn't seem to work. Am I missing something obvious?
 
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Does Amazon SES allow a direct SMTP connection? A Google search leads me to believe that it does not. I see people using special gateways to enable SMTP through regular email clients:

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Jake Bunce said:
Does Amazon SES allow a direct SMTP connection? A Google search leads me to believe that it does not. I see people using special gateways to enable SMTP through regular email clients:

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Click to expand...
It's recently started allowing SMTP. The cost is $0.10 for 1000 emails. :eek:
 
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It's pretty cheap to me. I have been eyeing it to replace the Google App email that we use for notification.
I have timeout/fail connection from Google mail server and a 500 email/day limit so I hope Amazon SES works better.

For newsletter, I use Mailchimp service.
 
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Andy.N said:
It's pretty cheap to me. I have been eyeing it to replace the Google App email that we use for notification.
I have timeout/fail connection from Google mail server and a 500 email/day limit so I hope Amazon SES works better.

For newsletter, I use Mailchimp service.
Click to expand...
But now you can use Amazon! Mailchimp is expensive!
 
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TheBigK said:
They'll provide you with the SMTP settings. Just enter them in your XF SMTP settings in Admin CP. Works fine.
Click to expand...
I did exactly that.
Select SSL, port 465, the mail server, download STMP username (a bunch of random letters) and password (a bunch of random letters).

I got a lot of XF errors on the XF ACP server logs that state "Authentication credentials invalid" and "Authentication required".

Do you know what's up? I requested production and got it. I verified sender, sent test email out fine.
 
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Andy.N said:
I did exactly that.
Select SSL, port 465, the mail server, download STMP username (a bunch of random letters) and password (a bunch of random letters).

I got a lot of XF errors on the XF ACP server logs that state "Authentication credentials invalid" and "Authentication required".

Do you know what's up? I requested production and got it. I verified sender, sent test email out fine.
Click to expand...
Not sure. The settings worked for me fine. Are you using the username & password provided by the system?
 
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