Moving from Mailgun to Amazon SES as an amateur

[Jonathan5]

I didn’t take notes for every single step of the way, but it seems to have worked. I’m happy to answer questions though can’t guarantee the answers will be good

Created a new Amazon SES identity for forum.example.com. It tells you the records to add for DMARC etc.

This explains how to get SES SMTP credentials: Obtaining Amazon SES SMTP credentials - Amazon Simple Email Service

Changed SMTP settings in app.yml - see Troubleshoot email on a new Discourse install. I’m not sure about these files so I added double quotation marks around all the strings.

For Mailgun I was using port 2525 had commented out DISCOURSE_SMTP_ENABLE_START_TLS: true.

For SES:

  DISCOURSE_SMTP_ADDRESS: "email-smtp.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com"
  DISCOURSE_SMTP_PORT: 587
  DISCOURSE_SMTP_USER_NAME: "xxx"
  DISCOURSE_SMTP_PASSWORD: "xxx"
  DISCOURSE_SMTP_ENABLE_START_TLS: true           # (optional, default true)

Followed the instructions below from: Configure VERP to handle bouncing e-mails. NB the SNS URL for me was https://eu-west-2.console.aws.amazon.com/sns/v3/home?region=eu-west-2#/dashboard

@Discourse

• On Discourse:
• set reply by email enabled and reply by email address as per the top of OP
• set manual polling enabled
• On AWS:
• create an SNS Topic
• create an SNS Subscription for the created Topic as HTTPS pointing to https://your.discourse/webhooks/aws
• go to SES > Verified Identities, select your site domain, and go to the Notifications tab. Edit your Feedback Notifications. Set the Bounce feedback and Complaint feedback to the SNS Topic you just created

Chose not to “Enable raw message delivery” (hope that was right).

Didn’t have to rebuild:

@Discourse

Doing a rebuild will often fix things that seem broken, but it takes a while. There are times when a full rebuild is not necessary; the above is usually the best advice, but If you change just SMTP settings, you can do just this to apply them without doing a full rebuild:

cd /var/discourse
./launcher destroy app
./launcher start app

Discourse - Admin - Email - Email settings - Preview summary - I used this to test emails, to valid and non-existent recipients.

Tested at https://www.mail-tester.com/ - 10/10

Discourse - Admin - Email - Email logs. Useful to check. Incidentally the error at "Discourse::NotFound" error when click "Email Type" field on admin/email/bounced no longer occurs.

Tested whether new topic sent notification email as expected.

Tested whether reply by email sent reply to that topic.