Yesterday I learned about postgrey and what it does to help protect you from spam. Basically it delays any email that it doesn’t recognize by causing a soft bounce. Many spam senders won’t send a second time. After it sees the sending server a few times it will white list the server.
With Amazon SES that isn’t so easy. Amazon uses many different servers to send emails on behalf of many businesses. It was taking sometimes over 5 minutes for emails to reach me when doing testing. I found something on a forum that helped me white list all of amazon’s servers. Got my delay time down to a second or two.
If you are running your own mail server I am sure you are comfortable poking around in it. If you ssh in and go to /etc/postgrey/ you will find two files. One is whitelist_clients and another is whitelist_receipients. You want to edit the whitelist_clients.
At the very end you need to add: /^.*.amazonses.com/
I reloaded postgrey and then tested and it worked like a charm.