Sitecore Configuring Email for Amazons SES

Recently I configured a Sitecore solution using Amazon’s SES (Send Email Service). There were two small changes I found that I needed to include in order to get it to work.

The first error was, “The SMTP server requires a secure connection or the client was not authenticated.” This happens because Amazon requires an SSL connection, because of this you’ll need to add the following to your web.config. You should place it at the very bottom, just before the </configuration> tag.

<system.net>
   <mailSettings>
      <smtp deliveryMethod="Network">
         <network enableSsl="true" />		
      </smtp>
   </mailSettings>
</system.net>

The next error was, “Email address is not verified.” This error was coming from Amazon and could mean that your account is still in ‘sandbox’ mode and that the email address you’re trying to use doesn’t have access from SES. Or, as it meant in my case, I needed to change the email address Sitecore was using to send emails. As you know, with Amazon you are connecting with a username such as “AKJHDKWEHNIDS” and not an email address. What you might not know, however, is that there is nowhere (that I could find) in any config file that allows you to specify a From address.

Browse to the following file: Website\sitecore\login\passwordrecovery.aspx open it and edit line 34. The tag <MailDefinition> has a From address, update it to the email address you’d like to use.

I wasn’t able to find these answers very easily so I hope this post saved you some time.