Sending Email Through .NET Blog Engine on RackSpace Cloud

I’m a cloud customer and I really really really love it. I can set up sites, servers, etc SUPER quick. It’s almost like owning my own server without all of the admin junk to take care of. However, sometimes I run into some issues with configuration, such as I did recently with Rackspace Cloud. 

I migrated my blog to the cloud and just recently a user sent me an email via my contact form. Unfortunately I never got it (he notified me via Twitter that he sent me a message).Therefore, my contact form has been down for over a month. I have NO idea how many emails have been lost in the ether. If you’ve sent me an email over the last month, via my contact form, I apologize – I never received it. Please send it to me again!

SOLUTION

In order to get email sending from the engine again I updated my settings in Blog Engine. I set up the SMTP server and sent a test email. FAIL. Nope, didnt work. After talking to the support team I was informed that you have to provide the following to get your site to send email via SMTP (all of these are set in Blog Engines settings): 

• A valid email user as the “authenticated user” to send email from. This would be something like [email protected]
• The users password
• SMTP server mail.[yourserver].com
• Your mail port: 25

I was not aware of this as it is not anywhere on the help for Rackspace cloud. I was told they will update their docs to reflect the instructions on how to send email. Hopefully this will help someone who uses the cloud for their Blog Engine if they run into the same problem.