Moving SMTP Listeners to Amazon EC2
Ever since we launched our SMTP listeners feature, something has been bothering me. The feature worked, but it wasn’t exactly how I wanted it to be. Here is how we had it implemented:
- The mail server (we use Port 25’s fine PowerMTA product) listens on port 25 and accepts connections. Whenever it receives a new message, it passes it to an external program. That is called a pipe delivery mechanism since the external program is a console tool that gets launched by the mail server and the message is piped to its standard input stream.
- We built a sophisticated management solution that modified the PowerMTA configuration whenever a customer registered a server for SMTP access. While PowerMTA really shines when quickly sending gazillion of emails at the same time, it is not very automatable. We had to edit config files and launch external processes to signal a configuration change and make the sender load the new settings.
Continue reading • Hristo Deshev wrote in Product news
