Email SMTP server recommendations? | Hacker News Reader

Email SMTP server recommendations?

3 pointsfinknottle5 comments

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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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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