i'm looking for a U.S. Host that PHP AND MYSQL that allows the connection to Amazon's SMTP (SES) servers to send bulk newsletters.
Most hosting providers should allow this. However in some cases, they may have SMTP_BLOCK enabled by default and you will need to inform them that you are intending to connect to a remote SMTP provider to send emails, so they can whitelist your account's username through their firewall to allow the connection to establish.
You need to understand that each company has limitations and rules and the best way is to get in touch with your potential company and say truth regarding what you are going to do. I'm sure such kind of approach can prevent you from headache.
As far as i know , almost every company allows external configuration as they dont have to worry about email spam or ip backlisting as everything is done outside their server
Yeap. But bulk email sending is something You'd better pre-discuss with your provider. Just to make sure and ensure your host that your bulk email sending has nothing to do with SPAM.
Take a look at hostplay.com offshore web host. They have manage to keep my site running smoothly even when it has grown 5 times bigger than it was with the previous hosts and I must say: always with excellent service and response times.
Typically, hosting providers do not care what their clients do on other providers' IPs and only would have restrictions in place to prevent some level (whatever your host may deem) of excess email sending from the smtp connections on their own servers. I'm sure you'll find a guide at your new email provider, but you should be able to modify your MX records to point to your new provider and sync up with their server.
Any providers will accept third-party SMTP/MX Records, I do not see any reason to not allow you to use your own mail server.
If you're going to be sending your emails using Amazon SES, there's no need to worry about your hosting. The emails are send outside of their servers/IP, it does not affect your hosting. Amazon SES has very tight rules though... they will be the one to worry about
If you are sending email via Amazon using SMTP most hosts should have no issue with it and only have problems if their own IP addresses are being used to send bulk email. The best bet though is to contact hosts to see what their policies on such things are.
How was the issue resolved? For other people looking for similar issues, your best bet is to open a ticket with the potential hosting provider and ask your request, or use their live chat service. As numerous other people iterated, hosting providers generally prefer to allow an external email provider handle emails so that they do not have to worry about their own ips getting blacklisted, but they may not have the ports open by default (some only open ports on request)