My LimeSurvey installation sits on an AWS instance and has access to the AWS Simple Email Service (SES). I send all of my application emails via PHPMailer and SES, so I know for a fact that all settings and credentials are correct and working, yet I am unable to get my SES account to work with LS. I constantly receive a "Cannot connect to server" error which should not be the case especially since there is no firewall involved in this, which leads me to suspect a possible issue with the authentication.

My SES account is located in eu-west-1, I login with my 16digit AWS account number (not an email address) and my secret as password. Does LS support AWS at all? Is there any documentation on how to make this work? I tried all sorts of configurations and just cant get it to work.

Thanks

Edit: LS documentation  is not really helpful for this

Edit: LS documentation is not really helpful for this

This is NOT the documention for Limesurvey Community Edition, this is the FAQ for when you use the SaaS service Limesurvey Pro provided by the Limesurvey GmbH.

Are you on their hosted service or are you using Limesurvey Community Edition on your own servers. Unfortunately you did not answer the base questions about where your installation is hosted, which version you use, etc.

My LimeSurvey installation sits on an AWS instance

Self-hosted with LS Community Edition (latest)
 

Anyone have any idea about this?

LimeSurvey uses the phpmailer library. There is nothing special about LimeSurvey.
You need to configure a valid SMTP server.

You can activate the debugoption in the mailsettings to get more infos.

Consult the documentation about AWS and SMTP to ensure you get everything right.
docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/send-e...oftware-package.html

I took short look and see a SMTP username and not the AWS 16digit number in the doc. But I currently don't use SES.

Well, yes and no.

I also use the phpmailer library with my various PHP projects and can connect without problems via my 16 digit AWS key as username. The issue I believe is with the SMTP authentication from LS since phpmailer separates between a username and from-email, which in LS seems to be the same thing.

An example would be that in AWS I authenticate with my AWS key as username, but set my FROM email as something else, since SES has domain authorisation and can essentially mask itself as any inbox name under that name. Long story short, there is a difference between username used for authentication and from email used for sending mail, which in LS seems to be the same value.

No worries, I fixed this by creating an actual email account via AWS WorkMail and use this one to authenticate and send from. Its a bit annoying though since I now have a physical inbox (that I am billed for) which I would have loved to avoid. Anyway.

Thanks!