Who are you using to send your forum emails ?

[Stemmy]

I am currently having some issues with sending my forum emails.

The server I am on was blacklisted (they are a very reputable server company). The have said they can get it delisted for me easily.

When my forum sent out an email i have 1000s of bounced emails because of this blacklist. im using the xenforo bounce handler so all these emails were chucked in the bounced category and they all had permissions refused. i suddenly got loads of emails from genuine members with problems.

I have disabled the bounce handler for now and am waiting for the server guys to clear the blcklist stuff.

My issue is if it keeps happening. I have heard that there are better places to send emails from, Gmail etc ??

Im just wondering who you are using and why ?

 

[M@rc]

Im just wondering who you are using and why ?

Amazon SES because they're really cheap ($1 = 10,000 emails).

 

[m1ne]

Postmark.

 

[Liam W]

I run my own mail server, using a low-end VPS. It allows me to be in full control, although this isn't a good option for pretty much anyone

Liam

 

[Jake B.]

Amazon SES, haven't had any issues

 

[Neutral Singh]

Is sendy.co a good viable option?

 

[Jake B.]

Is sendy.co a good viable option?

Sendy.co is just a mailing list/newsletter software that uses Amazon SES, you wouldn't hook XenForo directly up to it to send your normal forum emails

 

[Naz]

Is sendy.co a good viable option?

Sendy is for sending newsletters via Amazon SES. It's unrelated in this case.

 

[thumped]

SES

 

[ibnesayeed]

Discourse has a list of recommended email providers, many of those have a free tier. Elastic Email seems to have the most generous offerings among them all with 150 thousand monthly free emails.

 

[BoostN]

SES and Sparkpost. I love both... Sparkpost is free up to 100K a month I believe.

 

[Neutral Singh]

Sendy.co is just a mailing list/newsletter software that uses Amazon SES, you wouldn't hook XenForo directly up to it to send your normal forum emails

Wait! does the list below allow us to hook xenforo directly up to it to send your normal forum emails?

Discourse has a list of recommended email providers, many of those have a free tier. Elastic Email seems to have the most generous offerings among them all with 150 thousand monthly free emails.

 

[ibnesayeed]

Wait! does the list below allow us to hook xenforo directly up to it to send your normal forum emails?

Short answer, YES!

They provide you with SMTP relay service. As long as you hit them with proper credentials at proper endpoint, why would they care which application is generating those emails. You need to create an account in one of those services, verify your domain and configure DNS entries, then fill in the "Email Transport Method" configuration options in the ACP.

 

[optrex]

does bounced email work with these providers? I cant seem to get it to work through gmail etc.

 

[Sim]

Previously Mandrill, now SparkPost.

Hint: don't send bulk emails out to your members using SparkPost if you've never done a database cleanse before - large numbers of bounced emails will see your account disabled pretty quickly.

SparkPost are really strict on quality - which is one of the reasons I like them. It can be a major pain if you're not prepared to do the work to keep your emails high quality (ie low bounce rates / low rates of spam reports).

Another downside to SparkPost is that bounced email processing requires additional coding to work - since they use webhooks to deliver feedback loop notifications, rather than forwarding the bounce emails to somewhere that XenForo can pick them up from.

 

[AndreaMarucci]

I'm using mailgun and it works perfectly and it's free til 10.000 email per month

 

[BassMan]

SparkPost all the way for three forums. No complaints, reliable, fast, easy installation.

 

[surfsup]

Amazon SES because they're really cheap ($1 = 10,000 emails).

Amazon SES, haven't had any issues

I use Google Apps for business emails and they have a daily limit so I cant send off a ton of emails which really sucks cause we have a large forum with over 22K members. That being said, do I need to send off emails from a different domain address since we currently use the main one on google apps?

 

[Jake B.]

I use Google Apps for business emails and they have a daily limit so I cant send off a ton of emails which really sucks cause we have a large forum with over 22K members. That being said, do I need to send off emails from a different domain address since we currently use the main one on google apps?

Nope, you can use the same domain on Amazon SES and G Suite

 

[Floyd R Turbo]

Pepipost worked pretty good for me when I needed it. Bounce handler works, but they have a blacklist feature on their end that can blacklist an email on their end without causing the user's account on the forum to go to invalid/bounced, creating a black hole. I've brought up to them that they need to institute an alert of some kind in general to the admin (for any forum or other use) when this occurs, but so far that's fallen on deaf ears even though the say they are going to do it or consider it.

They also have occasionally had a test server go buggy and cause a bunch of user accounts to get flagged as invalid/bounced when those accounts weren't actually emailed (i.e. no notification sent from the forum, just a bounce shot back off the test server to the handler that causes the status change)

Other than that, it seems to work very well