AWS EC2 mail with SendGrid

mail is a beast. Sending email is easy but getting it pass spam filters when you’re a legitimate service is rather hard. Sending good email is especially hard when on EC2. The reason is due to spammers using and abusing elastic IPS. So, for startups your best bet of sending out a lot of email and getting it to the user is to use a service. You can pick Sendgrid. It’s cheap, fast, has good email tracking and builds all the appropriate email headers to get the mail white listed and into the destinations inbox. Sendgrid is the sender (think of them as an extension to sendmail).

New signups will usually get activated in less than four hours and then you simply add your username/password to the Postfix installation by editing the main.cf file.

First install postfix:

In Ubuntu, or any other apt using Linux distro, type in:

sudo apt-get install postfix

or if your system uses yum:

yum install postfix



Next choice your type of mail configuration: “Internet with Smarthost”.

From there, it’ll ask you questions that are entirely up to you.

It’s going to ask you for the smarthost address. Since we’re using SendGrid, use

smtp.sendgrid.net

Second edit the main.cf file:

Type in

sudo pico /etc/postfix/main.cf
or
sudo vi /etc/postfix/main.cf
to prepare the main.cf file

smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtp_sasl_password_maps = static:yourSendgridUsername:yourSendgridPassword
smtp_sasl_security_options = noanonymous
smtp_tls_security_level = may
header_size_limit = 4096000
relayhost = [smtp.sendgrid.net]:587

Replace yourSendgridUsername and yourSendgridPassword with your username and password.

sudo service postfix restart


Signup for SendGrid here

Google +1 /Plus One and your website

The +1 button is a shorthand for "this is pretty cool" or "you should check this out." Click +1 to publicly give something your stamp of approval. Your +1's can help friends, contacts and others find the stuff they search.

Learn more at http://google.com/+1button

Google has provided a “configurator” for web site owners to quickly and easily grab several variations on the necessary Google +1 code.
If you visited the link above, you’ll see that the basic +1 configuration options are self-explanatory.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/

Google URL Shortener for your website

Google URL Shortener at goo.gl is a service that takes long URLs and squeezes them into fewer characters

to share, tweet, or email to friends. The core goals of this service are:

Stability – ensuring that the service has very good uptime
Security – protecting users from malware and phishing pages
Speed – fast resolution of short URL

Google provides a gadget  for this service. The good news is you can add this gadget to your website.

Google shortener at Google