Can I send email from a domain without affecting existing users?

[mryossu]

I have a client who has an existing domain name, for which they have a web site and email set up. They have asked me to do a new web site, and given me control over the domain name.

I would like to be able to send emails from the web site, using their domain name as the “From” address, but I don’t want to disturb whatever setup they already have for sending emails manually. I don’t know how they currently send emails, but given that their MX records are of the form alt1.aspmx.l.google.com, my guess is they use Gmail.

I want to use Amazon SES if it makes any difference.

Anyone able to advise? Thanks.

[hanami.run]

Yes, you can.

In fact, anyone can email from your domain but upon receiving many mail server will mark as spam if you didn’t configure an SPF record.

Here are step to send email with Amazon SES:

1. Go to SES, add and verify your domain. They will ask you add a few CNAME/TXT record which don’t affect any thing on current domain.
2. Setup SPF. Since the current domain already use gmail, so don’t overwrite the SPF TXT record but only insert Amazon record. Example: ` “v=spf1 include:amazonses.com include:spf.google.com ~all”

Notice how include:amazonses.com was inserted in the middle.

[mryossu]

@hanami.run Thanks for the reply.

1. I already verified the domain, and added the TXT record.

2. There isn’t an SPF record in there at the moment. Will I be safe adding one for amazonses.com, or do I need to include google, given that there isn’t one there now?

Thanks again.

[hanami.run]

Let’s do for both for amazonses.com + google one as well. Whoever set it up before didn’t do it. So it should like this "v=spf1 include:amazonses.com include:_spf.google.com ~all"

[mryossu]

Sorry to be dumb, but can you clarify this for me. Do you mean I add two SPF records, one with the name amazonses.com and one with the name google.com, both with the content you showed, or did you mean one SPF record for both? If the latter, what do I specify for the record name?

Thanks again.

[hanami.run]

No, add a single TXT record like this in cloudflare

[mryossu]

Hello again,

Thanks for the reply. I put that in, but when I send emails from my web site, nothing arrives. I know the Amazon SES bit is working, because if I use a script on my local machine to send an email from my domain, it works fine.

Any ideas? I’m not sure if this is anything to do with Cloudflare or not.

Thanks again.

[sdayman]

Give mail-tester.com a try. It’ll give you an address to send to so it can test your outbound mail.

[mryossu]

Thanks, that’s a useful service.

The results are available here. There are a few issues, some of which are because this was a simple test from a script, so the content was only a few words, but nothing (as far as I can see) that should prevent it from being delivered.

However, the email never arrived. If I use exactly the same script, but change the address for the From header to another one I have with Amazon SES, the email arrives fine.

Any ideas? Thanks again.

[mryossu]

Update, after a delay, the email from the script did arrive. However, emails are still not arriving from the web site. I tried using mail-tester from the web site, but it said the mail never arrived. I checked I was using the same settings.

So where do I go form here? Thanks again.

[hanami.run]

Did you validate AWS SES domain or are you just whitelist a single sender address? You would need to whitelist the whole domain in order to send sender to arbitrary one.

Also, are you in AWS SES Sandbox? If you’re in sandbox then you would need to submit a request for AWS to move you off sandbox follow this document: Moving out of the Amazon SES sandbox - Amazon Simple Email Service

In sandbox, you are rate limited and can only send email to a few whitelist IP addresses. I think that’s the case here.

[mryossu]

After all that, it was an incorrect setting that was the problem. No idea why it wasn’t throwing an exception, but it works now.

Thanks very much for all the help.