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There are a number of things that can (and should) be done to prevent outgoing emails from your SMTP server not to be rejected or flagged as SPAM (or worse your
by moray 10y ago
There are a number of things that can (and should) be done to prevent outgoing emails from your SMTP server not to be rejected or flagged as SPAM (or worse your IP address blocked).
A part from the obvious basics (IP reverse lookup working, TLS support, SMTP auth for your users..) you can also set up DKIM [1] and SPF [2] that help a lot and are well supported by big providers like gmail.
But more importantly not ending up in a blacklist is important, so if you have users using your service you should monitor the volume of outgoing emails to avoid someone using your server to spam.
There are a few tools that you can use to check your SMTP server MXToolbox and CheckTLS are the two I often use. [3]
I agree though that managing an SMTP server is challenging, I had a couple of issues I had to work on that I am sure would never have happened to a big provider.
[1] http://www.dkim.org http://www.dkim.org
[2] http://www.openspf.org http://www.openspf.org
[3] http://mxtoolbox.com http://mxtoolbox.com http://www.checktls.com/testreceiver.html http://www.checktls.com/testreceiver.html
- danieltillett 10y agoYou can do all of these things and still a certain percentage of your emails will disappear into the ether. The game is rigged and the little guy has lost.
- lj3 10y agoI'm willing to accept email is rigged. Who uses it for actual communication these days anyway? I use mine primarily to get lifecycle emails from webapps I tried once and to reset passwords. What's next, then? There have been lots of replacements for all of the old school protocols like IM and IRC. Even newsgroups have been (adequately?) replaced by forums and link aggregates and facebook. But, I've seen no attempt to replace email. I've seen lots of attempts to enhance email, but none to replace it completely.
- mixedCase 10y ago>Who uses it for actual communication these days anyway? People outside of tech bubbles.
- lj3 10y agoPeople outside of tech bubbles use snapchat, facebook or whatever chat program is popular this week. I know this because I can't get anybody to return my emails. :(
- danieltillett 10y agoMaybe you should stop self-hosting your email server :) Defiantly there is a trend away from email outside of business, but in B2B email still rules. The ability to have a record of what was originally said and agreed to has saved my backside more than once.
- marssaxman 10y agoWhat do you use to communicate if not email? I use it constantly, as I have for years: one mailbox for work, one for personal stuff. My whole life flows through email, it sometimes seems. How else would it work?
- BatFastard 10y agoMore and more so Slack, it acts like email, chat, server communications tool, quite handy.
- marssaxman 10y agoHm. I hear about Slack but have never actually encountered it and have no idea why it is so popular. Perhaps someday its social network will finally connect up with mine and I'll find out why people care.
- lj3 10y agoFor the most part, facebook, twitter and sms. Trying to get people I know IRL to check their emails is a battle I lost about five years ago. If we're talking intra-company, then it's slack, hipchat, Yammer, google hangouts, trello, jira and whatever wiki system or wordpress is in use at the company I'm currently working for. Email for me, as I alluded to in my previous comment, is mostly about interacting with automated systems. If I need to reset a password, I'll get an email with a link. My car insurance company and web host will occasionally email me asking me for payment. Google emails me to let me know I've logged in using a computer it doesn't recognize (like my phone).
- moray 10y agoI get a photographer, video maker or someone working in fashion (I am sure there are other cases, I know those) using facebook or <x social tool> for business communication because it is trendy or it is more convenient, but preferring it to emails? There is obviously a problem here, there is so much talk about privacy and confidentiality and then you give all your communication in the hands of one company. What I am trying to say is that there is a fundamental technical difference between emails and <faceslaktter>: The first is based on a distributed, well defined (RFCs??), open protocols and formats. The second? It is an application, running on the premises of some company...
- herbst 10y agoEmail has not be to replaced, email just needs a better representation. IMO Inbox by Google fixed that issue for me.
- lelf 10y agoI thought so too. Well, until you have done everything, — DKIM, SPF and checks are green… And gmail is continuing put your e-mail to spam every now and then :/
- moray 10y agoThe thing is that it also depends on the client side (meaning the software client) and from the sender behaviour. For instance, I have a client (person) who now and then sends out a newsletter to some hundreds of addresses. He does that directly from the webmail. I always catch him because I have an alert on the mail queue, and every single time I check it I notice that the messages have been delayed because the remote server has a filter on "too many recipients at the same time" or "server sending too fast" or similar. This affects the way the remote server will consider further emails from your server, and change its "behaviour" temporarily. I use Postgray [1] that does very similar checks, and it is a great deterrent for incoming spammers. So I completely understand this strict checks from the point of view of a sys admin. Then there is the email content and headers that are checked by spam filters... but that's another story... [1] http://postgrey.schweikert.ch http://postgrey.schweikert.ch