Long story short: Upgrade! Amazon AWS is deprecated support for an important part of Amazon SES that Dada Mail relies on. v11.10.3 of Dada Mail and later adds the support for what’s now needed.
v11.10.3 of Dada Mail has just come out, and with it is support for something called Amazon AWS Signature Version 4. Long story short, it’s a way to sign/authenticate the email messages Dada Mail sends to Amazon SES, so that it knows that you’re allowed to send out messages. Technical information can be found here. Up until v11.10.3, Dada Mail only supported Signature Version 3 (and below). On September 30th, 2020 Amazon AWS will deprecate the support for Version 3 and below, and you’ll have to use Version 4.
If you’re running Dada Mail and utilizing Amazon SES, what are your options to continue to use the service?
Upgrade
The best thing to do is upgrade to the most recent version of Dada Mail – anything at or above version 11.10.3 will have the needed support to properly use Amazon SES moving forward. If you don’t know how, or don’t want to upgrade yourself, we do have services to do the upgrade for you. If you would like to do it yourself, we have docs on how to do that, too. Once you’ve done the upgrade, there’s nothing extra you’ll have to do to continue using Amazon SES moving forward.
Switch to the SMTP Gateway
With the deprecation of Signature Version 3, the API for Amazon SES won’t work in any version of Dada Mail prior to v11.10.3. But, you could still using the SMTP Gateway that Amazon SES provides. Before trying this, make sure that the correct ports are opened for outgoing communication (587 is recommended, but port 25 may also be used).
Patch Your Own Copy of Dada Mail
We’ll label this as a hack, mostly because it’s not been tested all that much, but should work, regardless. Just make sure that the version of Dada Mail you’re running is reasonably new – anything from v9 – v11 should have a good chance that this should be successful.
To do this hack, you’ll need to copy over two files from the most recent version of Dada Mail, to your running copy of Dada Mail. Here they are:
It’s VERY important to preserve the file path location. “Signature4.pm” doesn’t exist in any version of Dada Mail prior to v11.10.3, so it’s parent directory, “AWS” and the file itself will need to be created. “SES.pm” does exist in older versions of Dada Mail, and you’ll want to overwrite what’s in there.
If you’re stuck with not being able to upgrade, and cannot get this hack to work, contact us and we can apply this patch for a nominal cost.
Questions? Reply to this blog post, or post onto our support forum.