EC2 Ecommerce First Step

During a very busy holiday weekend, one of our clients running their ecommerce site on Amazon EC2 ran into a rather large snag. Their order email confirmations to customers were being delayed and sometimes not being sent out for hours later.

We logged into the server and started reading over the “mail.log” files. We noticed that every other attempt at Postfix SMTP delivery was being denied and it could not connect to the remote mail server. It was rampant on all sorts of regular mail traffic, like Google, Yahoo, Aol and MSN.

We tried telnetting to the mail port of some of these mail servers, via the SMTP port, but every 3rd attempt just “hung”.

After more digging, we found an obscure post on Stack Overflow (Read Here), that described our problems to the “t”. Due to the increased volume over our holiday sales orders, our mail traffic had been “throttled”, but no notification had been given to our account. (Note to EC2 support team: If you are going to impose a throttle at a specific time period, please notify the account holder, so we can respond).

You can request that your email limitations be removed (Request Form Here), but that may take a while until a support team rep is able to review your site.

Our review only took a few hours, and once it was complete the entire mail queue was delivered very quickly.

In anycase, the very first step we recommend ANY ecommerce client do, while setting up on Amazon’s EC2, is to immediately request that the email limit is removed for the account.

Don’t hesitate to contact us for any of your Cloud or website service questions!