What is a Good Mail Server?
- Thread starter Agen78
- Start date
my domains are parked at cloudflare and I hear that can be problematic, I got some advice to use the built in xenforo php email system and to move my domains over to a different registrar.
Cloudflare is not problematic. XenForo's built in email system (sending via php) is fine for testing purposes, but absolutely will cause problems sending large volumes of email with any kind of reasonable deliverability - because a lot of VPS IP addresses get blocked.
Any of the big email providers will work well - Sendgrid, Amazon SES, SparkPost, Postmark, Mailgun, Brevo - but you absolutely need to keep your mailing list clean (stop sending to addresses that bounce or make spam complaints) - otherwise you'll get blocked from these systems as well.
I send nearly 100,000 emails per month from my XenForo forums using SparkPost.
Any of the big email providers will work well - Sendgrid, Amazon SES, SparkPost, Postmark, Mailgun, Brevo - but you absolutely need to keep your mailing list clean (stop sending to addresses that bounce or make spam complaints) - otherwise you'll get blocked from these systems as well.
I send nearly 100,000 emails per month from my XenForo forums using SparkPost.
I have a crapload of domains on Cloudflare, and there has never been a single problem with SendGrid.
If you want to go the route of self-hosting a mail server, and all the potential headaches that it may or may not introduce, Mailu.io is an excellent option.
Otherwise, AWS's SES and Cloudflare both have options available. Granted, the Cloudflare route is apparently still in beta.
Otherwise, AWS's SES and Cloudflare both have options available. Granted, the Cloudflare route is apparently still in beta.
I ran my own mailserver for years. But don't do it, it gives you a world of problems. Mainly has to do with IP reputation and constant spamfilter tweaking.
I switched to https://mxroute.com/
Cheap and works great. Just one caveat, you can send a maximum of 400 mails per hour.
I switched to https://mxroute.com/
Cheap and works great. Just one caveat, you can send a maximum of 400 mails per hour.
I use resend seen to get more with the free plan than others
I'm using Google Workspace, but it's just a small forum. No issues in the past year. I send a weekly update email AKA newsletter, but as it's a small forum and it only goes to people logged in for the past 30 days, it only sends to about 200 people. There are stories of Google Workspace pulling it if you send too many in one go, but for a smaller site, it seems fine. Up to 2000 emails a day I think. And it goes through cloudflare. Don't fancy changing it again as it took so long to set up OAuth and cloudflare settings! The plus side is, if you move server, email just carries on via cloudflare - no changes needed. It could be cheaper though. It's costing £84 a year including vat.
I use Amazon SES for sending board emails and I use Google Workspace for sending/receiving emails that don't originate from XF. I'd recommend this same setup to anyone and everyone. It took me a few back and forth messages with SES to get set up there but it was well worth the effort IMO.
Amazon SES isn't user intuitive, I even tried to pay someone on Fivver to do it for $100 and it turns out they are just scammers all over that site now. I did get my money back though.
My problem was that they kept denying letting me out of the sandbox, or whatever they call it. After that I thought it was fairly simple to get set up to actually sending emails. Then another tough task was building an add-on that would use SNS notifications to notify me of bounces and complaints so I could automate that process. That took me longer than I'd care to admit. Now that it's finished, though, I'm happy as can be. I do think someone here wrote an add-on for that, though, that probably would have made my life much easier.
If you can ever convince them to let you out of the sandbox setting up credentials for SMTP is pretty easy. They have a button that does all the permissions for you automatically.
I could be misremembering but I believe all that's necessary is to add the domain/email identities, plug in the DKIM CNAME records, click a link in an email they send to you, click a button to add the SMTP credentials, then copy/paste the user/password they give you into XF.
Of course while doing all that you also have to get them to let you out of the sandbox which takes a lot more than just a friendly request in my experience.
amazon has a $100 credit for all of there services u can use it on.
Do you know which addon?
I also use mxroute, 4 years issue free.
How does it integrate (or replace) Xenforo's native bounce and unsubscribe handlers?
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