Right now we are just running the Agent Scoreboard development box on EC2. Eventually I want to move our production system to the platform for the scalability that it offers. The main problem I have come up against was email delivery from the system. Emails sent to a gmail.com account and a couple others were delivered successfully, but had issues sending to yahoo, hotmail and various other servers. Once I sat back and thought about this it made perfect sense. I can not set a reverse DNS entry for the IP the server is running on. This is getting my messages flagged as possible spam or getting rejected totally. Looking around found a couple sites that with act as an SMTP server for us for a reasonable price. Here are some that I found: authsmtp.com, dnsmadeeasy.com, easydns.com
Things may have changed (almost 3 years). http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/03/reverse-dns-for-ec2s-elastic-ip-addresses.html
I can’t wait for a blog post about it 😉
Things have definitely changed now. There is a form from Amazon that allows you to set up reverse DNS and don’t forget its very important to setup an SPF record for your domain. If you don’t want to worry at all about email you could try a service like Elastic Email (http://elasticemail.com)