Amazon recently announced SMTP Support for the Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) which is very cool. Now you can configure your server to send email through it regardless of what platform your site is built in (my previous post was only relevant to PHP servers)  There are 3 main things you need to do to configure your Postfix server to relay email through SES: Verify a sender email address, create an IAM user for SMTP and configure your server to use SES.

Verify a sender email address

1. In the SES section of the AWS Management Console, click on “Verified Senders”:
2. Then click on the “Verify a New Sender” button:
   
3. Enter the Sender’s Email Address and click “Submit”:
   
4. Then you’ll see the confirmation message:
   
5. Go to that email account and click on the link Amazon will email to you to confirm the address.

Create IAM Credentials

1. In the SES section of the AWS Management Console, click on “SMTP Settings”:
   
2. Click on the button “Create My SMTP Credentials”:
   
3. Choose a User Name and click “Create”:
   
4. Save the SMTP Username and SMTP Password that are displayed . We’ll need them when we’re configuring the server.
   

Configure the server

Now for the fun part. Here I assume you’re running Postfix as the MTA on your server.

1. Install stunnel:
   apt-get install stunnel
2. Add these lines to /etc/stunnel/stunnel.conf and make sure it starts properly (you may have to edit /etc/default/stunnel so that it starts automatically on boot):
   [smtp-tls-wrapper]
accept = 127.0.0.1:1125
client = yes
connect = email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com:465
3. Add this line to /etc/postfix/sender_dependent_relayhost:
   [email protected]  127.0.0.1:1125
4. Generate the hashfile with this command:
   postmap /etc/postfix/sender_dependent_relayhost
5. Add this line to /etc/postfix/password:
   127.0.0.1:1125 <your SMTP Username>:<your SMTP Password>
6. Fix the permissions on /etc/postfix/password
chown root:root /etc/postfix/password
chmod 600 /etc/postfix/password
7. Generate the hashfile with this command:
   postmap /etc/postfix/password
8. Add these lines to /etc/postfix/main.cf:
   sender_dependent_relayhost_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/sender_dependent_relayhost
smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/password
smtp_sasl_security_options =
9. Load the new configuration with this command:
   postfix reload

Additional Notes

After setting it up, look closely at the mail logs on your server to verify that they are being delivered properly.  As I found through testing, in certain misconfigurations your email will not be delivered and will not remain in the queue on the server.  The mail logs are the only place that will indicate that delivery is failing.

If you need to add other senders in the future, edit /etc/postfix/sender_dependent_relayhost accordingly then run:
postmap /etc/postfix/sender_dependent_relayhost
postfix reload

The reason for using sender_dependent_relayhost is because you want to specify what email gets sent through SES. If you try to send all email from the server through SES, you’ll probably have some end up going into a black hole. When I was testing this previous to using sender_dependent_relayhost, I didn’t have my root@ email address verified and so emails ended up bouncing back, then bouncing into oblivion never to be seen again (because it would try to relay email to root@ through SES too.)

http://www.millcreeksys.com/how-to-configure-your-postfix-server-to-relay-email-through-amazon-simple-email-service-ses/