How do I integrate and configure Amazon/AWS SES with Postfix running on my FreeBSD Unix server?

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is a hosted email service for you to send and receive email using your email addresses and domains. Typically SES used for sending bulk email or routing emails without hosting MTA with help of cloud servers provided by AWS. We can use Perl/Python/PHP APIs to send an email via SES. In this tutorial we are going to configure FreeBSD server or jail running Postfix to route all outgoing emails via AWS SES.

Procedure to configure AWS SES with Postfix

Before getting started with Amazon SES and Postfix for FreeBSD server, you need to sign up for AWS, including SES. You need to verify your email address and other settings. Make sure you create a user for SES access and download credentials too.

Step 1 – Disable Sendmail if enabled on FreeBSD

We need to use the sysrc command to safely edit system rc files. Let us disable sendmail, run:

### Make sure sendmail service stopped for Postfix ##
## service sendmail stop
### Disable sendmail service specific ##
## sysrc sendmail_enable="NO"
## sysrc sendmail_submit_enable="NO"
## sysrcsendmail_outbound_enable="NO"
## sysrc sendmail_msp_queue_enable="NO"

Also disable/remove sendmail server service specific cronjobs/tasks:

## vi /etc/periodic.conf

Append/modify as follows:

daily_clean_hoststat_enable="NO"
daily_status_mail_rejects_enable="NO"
daily_status_include_submit_mailq="NO"
daily_submit_queuerun="NO"

Save and close the file in vim/vi.

#aws #amazon web services #postfix mta