Using AWS for Email Address Forwarding

Question

I wish to use my domain name with Amazon Web Services. I know about transferring the DNS records and such but the problem is that I used LCN (low cost names) to purchase my domain. It has been with them for a few years and they provide email address forwarding for free as part of the service. If I move my domain I need to set up email address forwarding on AWS so that AWS is doing the equvalent email address forwarding that I get from LCN. I am trying to study all I can about AWS from Amazon's many kindle books but I am not sure about the most effective approach to do email forwarding. I could think that I could set up something like Postfix on an EC2 instance maybe and see if I can configure the AWS DNS settings to use the EC2 instance as the mail server for the domain. Am I on the right track? Is there a better way of doing this? I need to set up the forwarding first otherwise when I move the domain I risk any emails being sent to addresses on my hosted domain bouncing and not getting through to me.

Answer 1

You aren't going to actually 'move your domain' to AWS, AWS doesn't offer domain registration services (hope they do someday, but they don't)

EDIT: As of summer 2014, AWS does now provide domain hosting services.

So your domain is going to stay with a domain registrar, it needs to. Assuming your domain registrar offers DNS services, and assuming all you want to do is start hosting a website on AWS instead of where it is now, all you need to do is setup/point an A record to your AWS instances - they rest of the records, MX records presumably, will stay pointing to your current mail host.

If your current host won't do that for you (because they are 'all-or-nothing type of outfit), you still have lots of options, you can still keep your domain with the current registrar and use AWS route 53 to handle your DNS. You setup a/cname records to point to your website (presumably that what you want on EC2), and you can setup MX records to point to either a mail server you are hosting yourself on AWS (a really bad idea), or to an external provider such as gmail or personally I use Rackspace mail hosting.

You need to understand how DNS works a lot better, and once you do you will realize that if you are in control of your DNS you can have different bits and pieces of the same domain parceled out to lots of places/vendors, to do different parts of what you need.

My typical setup is this:

• Namecheap has my domain
• AWS Route 53 has my DNS (I forward the DNS from Namecheap to Route 53)
• EC2 hosts my websites
• Rackspace email hosts my incoming POP3 emails
• AWS SES handles all of my outgoing email (just a preference, Rackspace could do it).

As far as hosting your own mail server on Ec2, not generally a good idea - first of all hosting a mail server is a pain-in-the-neck - leave it to someone that does it all day long and pay them about $1-$2/month for the privilege. Sending email from an EC2 instance directly is an even worse idea - your email is going to get blacklisted by almost everyone in short order.

So you have lots of options - you are not locked into anything.