Socialbrowse is deployed on EC2 using the Django framework. Unfortunately, as we learned the hard way, EC2 has some serious issues with both reverseDNS and email blocklists and is a horrible place to send emails from. For this reason we use AuthSMTP, an email application that will has a much larger success rate for outgoing emails. The one catch to this is that you pay (a small but significant amount) for each email that is sent out.
About 5 days into using AuthSMTP our database went down for 2 minutes and I received 4k error messages from Django! This ate up my monthly AuthSMTP emails instantly and needless to say I was upset 
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To prevent this from happening again, I configured the error messages to be sent using a different email address. Error emails always go to my gmail account, which does not block EC2 emails so I don’t have to worry about the success rate and there for there is no need to go through AuthSMTP.
Here’s the snippet to change your outgoing error message email address.
- Change the mail_admins function in django/core/mail.py to the following.
- Edit the EMAIL_HOST_USER and EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD variables to be your email and password.
- Make sure Postfix or some other application that comes with sendmail is installed
- Restart your django server
After those steps your error messages will come directly from your server and not go through AuthSMTP as your regular outgoing emails do.
def mail_admins(subject, message, fail_silently=False): """Sends a message to the admins, as defined by the ADMINS setting.""" EMAIL_HOST = 'smtp.gmail.com' #'127.0.0.1' EMAIL_HOST_USER = 'YOUREMAIL@YOURDOMAIN.COM' EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = 'YOURPASSWORD' EMAIL_PORT = 587 EMAIL_USE_TLS = True connection = SMTPConnection(EMAIL_HOST, EMAIL_PORT, EMAIL_HOST_USER, EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD, EMAIL_USE_TLS) EmailMessage(settings.EMAIL_SUBJECT_PREFIX + subject, message, settings.SERVER_EMAIL, [a[1] for a in settings.ADMINS], connection=connection, ).send(fail_silently=fail_silently)
