Amazon EC2 Email can only send to Yahoo Mail, Not Gmail

Question

I have had a small issue with my EC2 email capabilities. While I am able to send emails from ec2 to my Yahoo Mail account, Gmail stopped receiving my EC2 emails as of 23 hours ago (ie, 23 hours ago, I could do the following and it would work.

mail("[email protected]", $subject, $message, $headers).

The code I use to send mail from my EC2 server is shown below. I checked all my spam box, filters, etc. in Gmail and have not seen any mail sent to my Gmail. In order to isolate the problem, I sent redirected all the messages sent from my EC2 from my Gmail to my Yahoo. And EC2 does successfully send emails to my Yahoo Mail account, with the modified code hilighted in orange below

I use this email feature on my website (www.JethroChan.com/contact.php) to allow people to use my form to send me emails directly from my website. My Gmail is the sole reciever of these emails from my Website's contact form.

<?php
  //send email
  $subject = $_REQUEST['subject'] ;
  $headers = $_REQUEST['headers'] ;
  $message = $_REQUEST['message'] ;
  mail("[email protected] (this was @gmail.com to a Valid Gmail account earlier)", $subject, $message, $headers);

  //echo "Email Sent!";

?>

Please help me see why only Yahoo, and Not Google is capable of receiving my EC2 emails as of today :D

E.J. Brennan E.J. Brennan · Accepted Answer · 2014-03-28T09:38:40

Generally speaking, its not recommended that you sent email directly from an ec2 instance. They have been used and and abused by spammers since day one, and many many email ISPs have taken the drastic step of blacklisting the entire range IP's used by EC2 from receiving email, just assuming it is all spam.

Much better to use amazon SES, which will cost next to nothing and is very simple drop-in replacement for your SMTP. It needs to be setup/verified, but after that it is pretty seamless. For what you are doing, it will probably cost you less than 10 cents a month.

http://aws.amazon.com/ses/

Amazon EC2 Email can only send to Yahoo Mail, Not Gmail

2 Answers