Setting up Meteor Email with AWS SMTP - email

Question

This Meteor server code tries to send email from the server start up.
The steps I followed after reading the AWS docs are:
1) Verify an email address which is also on AWS webMail.
2) Applied to increase sending limits.
3) Created and received SMTP credentials.
Meteor 1.4.4.2
email#1.2.1
//server/main.js
smtp = {
'username': 'from smtp credentials',
'password': 'from smtp credentials',
'host': 'email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com',
'port': '465',
'auth': true
};
process.env.MAIL_URL = 'smtp://' + encodeURIComponent(smtp.username) + ':' + encodeURIComponent(smtp.password) + '#' + encodeURIComponent(smtp.outgoingServer) + ':' + smtp.outgoingPort;
Meteor.startup(() => {
Email.send({
to: 'my-aws-verified-email#comp.com',
subject: 'sending-to-myselft',
text: 'Just checking if it is working'
});
});
Error: getaddrinfo ENOTFOUND undefined undefined:587
Any idea how to get it to work? thx
edit
After changing the process.env.MAIL_URL value to:
process.env.MAIL_URL = 'smtp://' + encodeURIComponent(smtp.username) +
':' + encodeURIComponent(smtp.password) +
'#' + encodeURIComponent(smtp.host) +
':' + smtp.auth + ':' + smtp.port;
The error now is:
Error: Greeting never received
changing the port to "587" gives a different error:
Error: Mail command failed: 501 Invalid MAIL FROM address provided
telnet email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com 465
Trying 107.21.244.69...
Connected to ses-smtp-prod-335357831.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
Connection closed by foreign host.
telnet email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com 2465
Trying 54.221.247.194...
Connected to ses-smtp-prod-335357831.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
Connection closed by foreign host.
telnet email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com 25
Trying 54.243.106.227...
telnet: connect to address 54.243.106.227: Connection refused
Trying 107.21.244.69...
telnet: connect to address 107.21.244.69: Connection refused
Trying 23.21.91.54...
telnet: connect to address 23.21.91.54: Connection refused
Trying 50.19.94.229...
telnet: connect to address 50.19.94.229: Connection refused
Trying 54.235.77.145...
telnet: connect to address 54.235.77.145: Connection refused
Trying 54.243.97.84...
telnet: connect to address 54.243.97.84: Connection refused
Trying 23.23.104.248...
telnet: connect to address 23.23.104.248: Connection refused
Trying 54.221.247.194...
telnet: connect to address 54.221.247.194: Connection refused
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host
telnet email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com 587
Trying 54.221.247.194...
Connected to ses-smtp-prod-t5t357831.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 email-smtp.amazonaws.com ESMTP SimpleEmailService-1110753669 CalqM0Qfzgny2ooZ0wo5
421 Timeout waiting for data from client.
Connection closed by foreign host.
telnet email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com 2587
Trying 23.23.104.248...
Connected to ses-smtp-prod-337800831.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 email-smtp.amazonaws.com ESMTP SimpleEmailService-20753669yy 4qrIfUj4ApTwkj4ZJUNa
421 Timeout waiting for data from client.
Connection closed by foreign host.

Answer 1

You were troubleshooting two simultaneous issues, and when you fixed one of them, it wasn't obvious that you were making progress, because then you encountered the other.
For outbound email, SES listens on two sets of ports.
STARTTLS on the standard port 587, the traditional (but wrong) port 25, and an unprivileged port 2587.
TLS Wrapper on the standard port 465, and an unprivileged port 2465.
The difference between the two sets is how the SSL (TLS) is negotiated. With STARTTLS, the server talks first and the client asks that the connection switch to encrypted mode... while with TLS Wrapper, the connection starts out with TLS but the client talks first, initiating TLS negotiation.
Clearly, from these descriptions, using a TLS Wrapper port when the client anticipates using STARTTLS will result in a timeout, since both sides are waiting for the other side to talk.
Port 25 is not a winner, since EC2 has aggressive rate limiting enabled by default, to prevent the obvious spam problem that would otherwise happen. You can ask for this to be disabled by submitting a support request, but the simplest solution is to just use port 587.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/smtp-connect.html
Then, your client wasn't setting a sender address, since no from address was being specified.