Recently I decided to move to Amazon Web Services and I'm happy with my decision, but I'm not sure if I should outsource the whole email-thing, because it seems to require a considerable administrative effort to keep everything running smooth.
My production servers are running on Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal and I gave iRedMail a shot for a quick mail server setup.
For DNS handling I use Route 53 and created an A Record which points mail.mydomain.com to the Elastic IP of my EC2 instance, which runs the mail server. I also created a MX Record with this value: 10 mail.mydomain.com. – is that config ok?
Sending Mails works like a charm, but I can't receive them.
I have to admit that I'm not really interested how the internals of email delivery work and I'd really appreciate if someone can point me to a good provider for scalable (in- and outbound) email solutions. SendGrid looks really nice and has some big testimonials, but they online care about my outbound traffic.
Best Answer
This isn't really a shopping site, but if your attitude is that you just want it to work without having to actually work on maintaining it, you definitely need to outsource it to another provider, or move to something like GMail and the Google Apps for business program. Mail isn't a magic thing that just works, there are people who have to monitor it and maintain it and often that means being willing to roll up your sleeves and research how to keep it running despite network issues, configuration issues, spammers and anti-spam efforts.
Seriously. Outsource it.