Post by nschurmann » Mon Mar 25, 2013 5:55 am

Hello!

I have an instance of amazon EC2 with opencart in it. Somehow there is just no way to send emails. Using the mail function i can't recieve em on my inbox.

I've read that amazon is a big firewall that blocks every single mail that you try to send from EC2. So the better way to send mails is through SMTP.

So i wanted to configure the SES service to use it through my OpenCart instance. But failed everytime.

I'm using SMTP, and tryed with port 25 and 465.

I use the username and password that amazon provides me when i create an SMTP user with its credentials.
User: robot
credentials:
user->somehash,
pass->anotherHash

Could you give me some pointers in what i'm doing wrong?

The version is 1.5.5.1

Thanks!

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Post by butte » Sat Mar 30, 2013 4:38 am

Okay, congratulations, you've apparently overcome what stops most people trying to set up on EC2, and you should have a whole zoo of settings that you can make, easily or not. Mail is not among the easy ones. You can set up inside your nonpublic area the mail program that is already there as an image. You must go into the mail setups separately, whether you use that program or not. You must first put up with a Sandbox mail setup, which will require authentication of each of several addresses that will be allowed to communicate among themselves via the Sandbox mailserver. When that works, you may APPLY (using a form for that) for upgrading your smtp service through Amazon.

If you use current Firefox, there is a v. special plug-in/extension/module named Elastifox whose sole purpose is to connect to your EC2 account. You will still need to go into your https EC2 account in order to work or wrestle with the smtp setups. Firefox happens to have a further, mundane advantage, that you can manage v. quickly (Tools / Settings / Privacy) the blockable arrivals and summary expungements of future and present cookies just before you go into any server account or administrative panel or launch Elastifox. If it's not an Amazon cookie or while you're working on it an OC cookie, kill it.

Forewarning.-- If you putter forth through the EC2 forums, then you will discover that the majority has no idea where to begin with Linux or anything else, as well as that the minority has expectations that a substantial frequency of crashes thwarts and for which support is, well, called support anyway. The lesson from that is to learn or know what you are doing in setting up an entire array of servers and drives, and to make frequent backups of everything (everything everything), which you can do via your https account or via Elastifox. It's all a piece of cake, it's just one v. big cake with many slices and layers and whatnot; inside a complete zoo. And since you're using EC2 you'll be ahead to avail yourself of the advantages of Linux (you can even choose among several distributions) over Windows.

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Post by sml » Wed Jan 01, 2014 10:31 am

nschurmann

Did you ever get AWS SES working with OpenCart?

sml
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Post by sml » Wed Jan 01, 2014 5:48 pm

Solved ....

Refer to my thread here ...
http://forum.opencart.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=116948

Quick solution, as per the majority of OpenCart, an extension is required to provide decent functionality ... basically the solution is to use this extension, but refer to post above for more specific info ....

http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route ... on_id=3932

OR ...

https://bitbucket.org/spotonsolutions/o ... /wiki/Home

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Post by butte » Fri Jan 03, 2014 1:27 pm

It appears that you circumvented the AWS SES mailing by turning to outside smtp or php sending, just as can be done on any ordinary server. As above, "You must first put up with a Sandbox mail setup, which will require authentication of each of several addresses that will be allowed to communicate among themselves via the Sandbox mailserver. When that works, you may APPLY (using a form for that) for upgrading your smtp service through Amazon." Then you can send from Amazon smtp; not before. You set up a workaround, which is fine.

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Post by sml » Fri Jan 03, 2014 3:09 pm

butte wrote:It appears that you circumvented the AWS SES mailing by turning to outside smtp or php sending, just as can be done on any ordinary server. You set up a workaround, which is fine.
Hi butte,
No it is not a workaround .. I tried with SES sandbox authenticited emails and they worked fine from my Magento system and SES test emails. The problem is the dodgy OpenCart mail system, but SES worked fine with the Xsecrets mail extension installed in OpenCart.

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Post by butte » Sat Jan 04, 2014 6:33 am

Congratulations, to you and to XSecrets.

The sense of "workaround" was that your OC mail is, apparently, not going straight through Amazon's own smtp mailservers and security measures. If it is, then you are not just avoiding but are moreover upgraded from the mail sandbox. None of us who has not purchased it knows what is inside XSecrets' work.

You may have gotten past the sandbox without realizing (or remembering) it, if you applied for and received smtp approval and were let out of the EC2 mail sandbox, which itself allows only mail back and forth among senders already tested and approved for just that and just within the sandbox. External smtp and php mailing are allowed, they do not go through Amazon mailservers. Magento and XSecrets evidently utilized external smtp, as there is no way (unless you were already upgraded from sandbox mail) to overcome the sandbox limitation by using EC2 smtp -- meaning Amazon's own mailservers.

You can also install a mailserver in your instance -- there are several for each operating system (e.g., Linux, Windows) that you might have.

Where you noted above the "big firewall that blocks every single mail that you try to send from EC2," leaving preference for external smtp, after approval to leave (upgrade from) the sandbox, then the EC2 non-sandboxed mail utilizing Amazon's own mailservers will work normal ways, but with added security. With the sandbox there are several steps in addition to traditional spf records, and you apparently did those steps in order just to get sandbox to work.

In EC2 keep an eye on your usage and billing, they sometimes surges even in the free tier, let alone in the other tiers.

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Post by sml » Sat Jan 04, 2014 6:51 am

I am not quite sure why you are making this sound so complicated.

I was using AWS SES Sandbox with DKIM and testing with email addressed that I had authenticated ... it really quite simple. Then had my AWS SES account approved and it also works correctly with approved account to any emails.

As you can see here, there are others who had not been able to use default OpenCart mail and AWS SES ...
https://github.com/opencart/opencart/issues/897

The XSecrets mod is free btw if you want to take a look at the code ...
http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route ... on_id=3932

This newsletter mod also includes a mail system that works correctly ...
http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route ... on_id=4776

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