Mike Fara
Active member
Hello gentlemen, and the great developers of XenForo:
Basically many of us have port 25 firewalled - especially those of us stuck... in the cloud. The original reason was spam related, however, I am starting to think that these services want everyone to use their mail platform instead of sendmail. Nonetheless... Google lets Compute Engine instances use port 587 and 465. This allows interaction with GSuite and sending mail from third party providers. https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/tutorials/sending-mail/
HOWEVER,
The excellent system that you developed in XF 1.4(?) of checking for bounced emails and unsubscribes is pretty much screwed if you use Mailgun. This is because these types of services automatically create their own bounce lists and block further communication to those addresses automatically. There is no magic bullet to inform or even send the Mail Delivery Subsystem bounces back to an address that XenForo can process...
What we did was have one GSuite account, and use mail routing to forward bounced mails and unsubscribe mails to two seperate Gmail accounts that are checked via IMAP. This seems to work, but is a crazy setup that is kind of bogus. We don't know when we will hit Google's e-mail limitations for sending mail to ourselves.
That is why I am asking the XenForo developers to update the entire mail system in XenForo for compatibility with Mailgun's API/webhooks interface. And maybe Sendgrid as well. I think you will find there are many other members who have similar problems, or simply fail to configure the bounced e-mail verification thing because of the problem of cloud-hosted solutions blocking mail ports and the general douchebaggery of their mail policy. For instance, if we had access to port 25, we could just run our own mailserver and the issue would be over with. We could create as many mail accounts as needed and resolve this problem overnight. While anyone can create a free Gmail account, a seperate GSuite account costs $5-6/mo. (even if you want to use it just for Gmail and not organizational purposes).
Mailgun's API is probably similar to Sendgrid, but I haven't checked. Direct interaction with their systems could not only send mail, but check their status once sent. There was an addon developer who supported this years ago with his code at: https://xenforo.com/community/resources/bd-mails.2313/
If you look at the replies to this update, a bazillion XenForo users have begged him to update this addon for XF 2.*. Its not happening. That is why native support for Mailgun, Sendgrid, etc. is absolutely imperative. People on GCE, AWS, etc, otherwise have to go through extraordinarily crazy configuration to even get the bounced email verification to work and thus cannot reliably use these services. Hope you consider this feedback!
Basically many of us have port 25 firewalled - especially those of us stuck... in the cloud. The original reason was spam related, however, I am starting to think that these services want everyone to use their mail platform instead of sendmail. Nonetheless... Google lets Compute Engine instances use port 587 and 465. This allows interaction with GSuite and sending mail from third party providers. https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/tutorials/sending-mail/
HOWEVER,
The excellent system that you developed in XF 1.4(?) of checking for bounced emails and unsubscribes is pretty much screwed if you use Mailgun. This is because these types of services automatically create their own bounce lists and block further communication to those addresses automatically. There is no magic bullet to inform or even send the Mail Delivery Subsystem bounces back to an address that XenForo can process...
What we did was have one GSuite account, and use mail routing to forward bounced mails and unsubscribe mails to two seperate Gmail accounts that are checked via IMAP. This seems to work, but is a crazy setup that is kind of bogus. We don't know when we will hit Google's e-mail limitations for sending mail to ourselves.
That is why I am asking the XenForo developers to update the entire mail system in XenForo for compatibility with Mailgun's API/webhooks interface. And maybe Sendgrid as well. I think you will find there are many other members who have similar problems, or simply fail to configure the bounced e-mail verification thing because of the problem of cloud-hosted solutions blocking mail ports and the general douchebaggery of their mail policy. For instance, if we had access to port 25, we could just run our own mailserver and the issue would be over with. We could create as many mail accounts as needed and resolve this problem overnight. While anyone can create a free Gmail account, a seperate GSuite account costs $5-6/mo. (even if you want to use it just for Gmail and not organizational purposes).
Mailgun's API is probably similar to Sendgrid, but I haven't checked. Direct interaction with their systems could not only send mail, but check their status once sent. There was an addon developer who supported this years ago with his code at: https://xenforo.com/community/resources/bd-mails.2313/
If you look at the replies to this update, a bazillion XenForo users have begged him to update this addon for XF 2.*. Its not happening. That is why native support for Mailgun, Sendgrid, etc. is absolutely imperative. People on GCE, AWS, etc, otherwise have to go through extraordinarily crazy configuration to even get the bounced email verification to work and thus cannot reliably use these services. Hope you consider this feedback!
