Configuring exim4 for AWS/Amazon/SES

Exim4 and AWS SES

So if you want to use Amazon SES to send out emails, you'll need to verify your email address under Identity management -> Email addresses, which should send you an email to verify you own the recipient address.

Create SES credentials 

Under Email settings -> SMTP settings.

Don't forget them!

Configure Exim

 dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config

• mail sent by smarthost, received via SMTP or fetchmail
• your fully qualified domain name (e.g. example.com)
• 127.0.0.1   for listen address
• your fully qualified domain name (e.g. example.com) for final destination
• no relay servers
• your AWS SES smtp server as outgoing smarthost.  Importantly, don’t use the default port of 25, as 25 is unencrypted, and exim4 won’t send passwords over unencrypted connections without messing around.  So, for example, you might have “email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com::587”
• Accept defaults for everything else

Create a file /etc/exim4/passwd.client.  This will give exim4 the logon credentials.  Importantly, amazon will resolve to a different server name each time (via the load balancer), so you can’t just put your smtp server name in here.  Your format should be something like:

# password file used when the local exim is authenticating to a remote
# host as a client.
#
# see exim4_passwd_client(5) for more documentation
#
# Example:
### target.mail.server.example:login:password
*.amazonaws.com:<smtp_username>:<smtp_password>

Also check your aliases file in /etc/aliases