I recently put together a small Drupal module that interfaces with Elastic Email, a mail relay service. That is, instead of your website sending mail via its own SMTP server, outgoing email is directed through the Elastic Email service and out onto the internet. This module provides plug n’ play integration with the Elastic Email service.

Elastic Email is of particular use to cloud-hosted websites. There are three prominent reasons to use it:

• Some cloud services (or rather, their IP address ranges) are blacklisted by anti-spam services because of the high volumes of spam emanating from their servers. For example: Amazon/AWS. That is to say, if you send email directly from AWS, there’s a good chance it will be blocked by spam filters.
• Some servers have restrictions on outgoing ports, i.e. SMTP. Your website may simply be unable to use SMTP. Elastic Email uses a REST-style API over HTTPS. So, all you need open is port 443, the standard HTTPS port.
• But the main reason may be that you can be up and running in less than 5 minutes total. Really. You can even get an account that lets you send 1000 emails before you need to pay up. And there’s no need to mess with configuring sendmail or postfix on your server: all configuration is done from one simple Drupal admin screen.

For more, visit the project page on Drupal.org.