Have an app that sends Email and runs on Google Compute Engine (GCE)? Can’t use a locally installed mail server to send emails because Google is blocking sending Emails through the GCE infrastructure?

The solution is simple. Use a 3rd party Email service such as Mandrill, Mailgun, Sendgrid, etc.

Don’t want to change your code and still use a locally installed mail server to forward emails but it doesn’t work?

The solution is simple:

• Install postfix
• Configure postfix to forward using port 2525
• Make sure to enable SASL authentication if the Email service you are using supports it (most do)

I have a server running Celery and I wanted to configure it to send Emails on errors. Celery can only work with a regular SMTP server so I had to install a local one and make sure I forward it to Mandrill, our Email service of choice.

I configured it to forward to smtp.mandrillapp.com port 2525 and configured sasl authentication with our username and password.

# enable SASL authentication
smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
# tell Postfix where the credentials are stored
smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
smtp_sasl_security_options = noanonymous
# use STARTTLS for encryption
smtp_use_tls = yes
relayhost = [smtp.mandrillapp.com]:2525

Works like a charm!