Email server on AWS EC2

Question

High level, what I'm tying to do: We want to create a specific email address for each of our customers on our domain name (example customer01@xyz.com). When an email is received at that address, our system will associate the attachment with that customer and process it a certain way. The email addresses will only be used for this purpose, so I don't really need a user interface or anything (although it might be nice to have for troubleshooting).

I've just started using AWS and have an overall understanding of the services. I'm planning on doing this on an EC2 instance.

I'm assuming it's possible to set up a mail server (incoming mail only) to constantly monitor all the customer specific email address and process any attachments that come in.

Where do I even start with researching this (I've Googled it but need more direction)? Here are some questions that come to mind: 1) What mail server software is best for this? Or is this even needed? 2) Is it possible to write code to monitor the incoming email for ALL email addresses simultaneously? I don't mind buying existing software if it fits our needs.

I'm a programmer myself but will not be coding this project. I'll be hiring someone from Elance but I want to at least have a general knowledge of what is needed before posting the job.

Thanks for any advice or links to helpful sites to get me in the right direction here.

Answer 1

Your requirement concentrates on processing the received Incoming Emails. AWS doesn't have any out of the box service / solution. Amazon Provides SES - Simple Email Service, which will help you deliver emails.

You need to build your solution on SMTP Servers like MS Exchange or Apache James etc.

Answer 2

This product: http://www.email2db.com/ should do what you want. You could install it on EC2 or even use their hosted edition. Not cheap, but I suspect a lot cheaper than hiring someone to write something with 1/10 the features.

Answer 3

There are some cloud services that provide such solution like Mailgun or Mandrill. Presonally I've only used Mailgun and it's awesome. You setup routing rules based on regexp on a domain and you can set them up to be redirected as a POST to your website. Both providers have a free tier of 10-12k mails per month wich is great.

Regards, Marc