Configuring for Reliable Email Sending

[Mark Hansen]

Are there any good articles about how to configure your XenForo host to send emails reliably (so they are not treated as SPAM)?

Ideally, I'd like the emails that go our for verification of new registrations to come from support@megalytic.com - but that is a Google Apps account. Another alternative we've been looking at is using SendGrid. But, I'm not sure what is the best way to hook up the Zend Framework mail transport that XenForo uses with either Google Apps or with SendGrid.

We are running XenForo on Ubuntu 13.04 on an Amazon EC2 instance.

 

[Mouth]

Amazon EC2 instance.

Then why not use Amazon SES, which is free for EC2 users - http://aws.amazon.com/ses/faqs/

 

[Mark Hansen]

Cause I'm not sure how to make it work with XenForo. That's why I'm posting here. To see if anybody has pointers about how to configure XenForo with SendGrid, or SES, or whatever. Just need it to be reliable and not sending emails to SPAM.

 

[Mouth]

Cause I'm not sure how to make it work with XenForo.

http://aws.amazon.com/ses/faqs/#22
Just set it as your mail server within XF.

 

[Mark Hansen]

Thanks - I thought it would be harder! So, I just configured SMTP to work with SendGrid. We've had some deliverability problems with SES and like SendGrid better.

 

[Floren]

What is your emails capacity? With a modest CPU, postfix can sustain easy 50,000 mails/hour. The key words are RAM and I/O.
http://www.postfix.org/TUNING_README.html

 

[Non Guru]

Here's some guide to use SES as your SMTP http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/send-email-smtp.html

 

[japersonal]

I recently started using mandrill.com and I'm quite happy with them. Pricing is like double of Amazon SES, but Mandrill is a ready-to-use service, plus you have nice charts to see how your sending emails are going.

 

[Mark Hansen]

Oh, its only a few dozen per day at this point.

What is your emails capacity? With a modest CPU, postfix can sustain easy 50,000 mails/hour. The key words are RAM and I/O.
http://www.postfix.org/TUNING_README.html

 

[Mark Hansen]

Thanks. We had problems with SES blacklisting our customers. Not us, but whenever an email would bounce, SES would not send to that email address any longer. Some perfectly fine email addresses would occasionally bounce and end up on this list. There was not obvious way to see the list or get alerted to when this happened. That was about a year ago. Might be different now.

Here's some guide to use SES as your SMTP http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/send-email-smtp.html

 

[Blue]

Mandrill was easy to get up and running. Just set it up like any other SMTP mail account.