SMTP Relay Service

[nextechinc]

We provide small scale web and e-mail hosting for our customers. So far I've just been dealing with IP blacklists and delivery issues myself. It's an extremely tedious and often times frustrating process. I was wondering if anyone has had any success with an inexpensive relay service I could put in front of our mail server so I don't have to deal with it anymore.

 

[allstarit]

I often use the ISP and do a smart host to their SMTP and no need for authentication as your on their connection.

If the ISP blocks you then i use my Plesk Server which has Mail Enable as its mail program and you can add your customer IP to white list and authorise the relay from their server to yours.

Hope that helps

 

[allstarit]

As a permanent relay we use Trend Hosted Email Security that allows outbound filter and this comes with Worry Free Business Advanced license but this can be costly so may not ne an option for you

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Just curious, what's your setup? We've done "in house" mail filtering for our biz clients for many years (which includes outbound SMTP for their Exchange servers)....haven't had issues.

What's the details of your setup?

 

[drpcfix]

Use mandrill, it's by mailchimp - they know what they are doing, they give you a free account for 12k emails a month. Many methods to send email, including smtp.

 

[nextechinc]

I'm running an AWS instance with CentOS and Plesk. I've been running mail through Amazon SES and thought that would be the answer, but I still have customers with delivery issues, and I'm noticing the IP's used by SES are occasionally showing up on various blacklists. I just want something I can relay postfix through and forget all about what an RBL ever was.

Thanks for the suggestion drpcfix, Mandrill looks like it might do the trick!

 

[Vicenarian]

Use mandrill, it's by mailchimp - they know what they are doing, they give you a free account for 12k emails a month. Many methods to send email, including smtp.

Thanks for this suggestion, +rep.

I have some customers with emails being sent through their email provider's SMTP server, getting caught in spam filters. This should do the trick

Edit: Link for setting Mandrill SMTP server for a desktop email client:
http://help.mandrill.com/entries/21...sktop-email-program-to-send-through-Mandrill-

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I'm running an AWS instance with CentOS and Plesk. I've been running mail through Amazon SES and thought that would be the answer, but I still have customers with delivery issues, and I'm noticing the IP's used by SES are occasionally showing up on various blacklists. I just want something I can relay postfix through and forget all about what an RBL ever was.

Thanks for the suggestion drpcfix, Mandrill looks like it might do the trick!

We run our SMTP services...our first one is at our office, our backup second and third ones are hosted in data centers....all with IPs that shouldn't change. The IPs are in our PTR include all. Which goes in the DNS records for every clients domain that we manage.

 

[nextechinc]

The elastic (static) IPs in AWS, seem to be frowned upon by a number of BL's, even with the PTR record set up properly. In the past we've also had to deal with our IP getting blacklisted because of "noisy" neighbors on the same /24 subnet that were sending spam. There's also the occasional "who knows" blacklist where our logs look squeaky clean yet some ISP took it upon themselves to add us to a blacklist and their horrible automated removal system takes a week to get our IP removed, if it works at all. If I could pay ~$10/mo to never have to deal with that stuff again it would be money well spent.

 

[Markverhyden]

The elastic (static) IPs in AWS, seem to be frowned upon by a number of BL's, even with the PTR record set up properly. In the past we've also had to deal with our IP getting blacklisted because of "noisy" neighbors on the same /24 subnet that were sending spam. There's also the occasional "who knows" blacklist where our logs look squeaky clean yet some ISP took it upon themselves to add us to a blacklist and their horrible automated removal system takes a week to get our IP removed, if it works at all. If I could pay ~$10/mo to never have to deal with that stuff again it would be money well spent.

That makes complete sense. Given the ease at which one can spin up a machine there it's no surprise.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Yeah I guess AWS could be pretty gray...

 

[nextechinc]

That makes complete sense. Given the ease at which one can spin up a machine there it's no surprise.

I'm sure this is the reason they came up with SES. However I think SES is geared more as an API for web apps to send transactional e-mails. I'm just not getting the results I'm looking for in my situation.

 

[freedomit]

Check out AuthSMTP

 

[nextechinc]

Just wanted to follow up. Mandrill has solved the issue entirely. The built in reporting is also great to see details on the mail sent through the service and prove that it was in fact delivered.