

Email SMTP server recommendations? - finknottle

We want to send biweekly emails + user registration emails, etc. for our web startup. Any other startups have experience in what kind of smtp service to use (if any), or set up our own email server? It seems that even if the SPF settings are correct, there is a problem of other popular email services (gmail, hotmail, etc.) recognizing our emails as spam, and we want to get away from that. Any feedback will be welcome.
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raamdev
I've run across this problem several times. I now recommend to my clients (and
use in my own projects) AuthSMTP: <http://www.authsmtp.com>. I've been using
them for a few years and I have never had a single outage or problem with
their service. I also use them for all of my personal and work email.

Their FAQ states their system is configured to allow a maximum of 50
recipients per message, though they recommend you keep it to 10:

<http://authsmtp.com/faqs/faq-20.html>

If you contact their support team, they can answer any questions regarding
limits. The few times I've had to interact with them they were very
knowledgeable and helpful.

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snowstorm
Yes. it's a pain in setting up mail server to get emails delivered to users
from applications.

SPF is not enough. You need to set up domainkeys as well. see my post at
<http://www.kai-mai.com/node/156> for details.

You absolutely need to stop any open relay on your server. Once your server
gets onto a black list, it's hard to get off it.

The other solution is to pay some provider to outsource your email delivery.
Check <http://www.emaildiscussions.com/>

You shouldn't rely on gmail's IMAP server to deliver emails because it has
daily limits.

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brk
My experience is slightly dated (2 years), but I've always had the best luck
running my own sendmail setup on a box I own/maintain.

SPAM flagging will have a lot to do with content, and some to do with your
source IP (IME). Sharing a server (and source IP) with a bunch of other people
doesn't help your odds.

Owning and controlling the server, the DNS records (forward AND reverse), plus
sending a few test messages to test accounts, has always seemed to work best
for me personally.

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finknottle
Thanks for all the comments. I read about AuthSMTP, but their plans seem very
expensive. We will soon hit more than 200K emails per month, and as per their
pricing plans, that's pretty expensive. I am trying to figure out what else I
need to do on my own server so that I dont get blacklisted.

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tedroden
What about using gmail? I'm using that for a project of mine and it's working
pretty well.

You can only send so many with a free account, but I believe you can send a
lot more with their apps for domains product (or whatever it's called)... just
a thought.

