SMTP server

I have a number of domains, each with some email addresses. I use Hostgator for hosting these, and it all works fine for much of the time, but goes through periods of email delivery failure due to spam filtering at some receiving addresses, when using Hostgator's outgoing SMTP. These are just personal emails, not marketing emails. I have never sent marketing emails, in fact I strongly dislike email marketing!

Can anyone suggest either an alternative host which has a better reputation and doesn't have this problem (I imagine this happens with most hosts as people abuse the system), or a separate inexpensive SMTP provider with good deliverabilty? Most of the SMTP providers I've looked at seem to exist mainly for email marketing purposes, which doesn't seem a great idea! Thanks for any comments.

What about your ISP?

Edit: I use my ISP's SMTP server for all outgoing e-mails and my hosting company for POP3 (and IMAP) access to my mailboxes. I use WebFaction. It's a little more expensive that HostGator, but I like the service that I get.

Edited by deleted (Tue 26-Apr-16 13:27:11)

In reply to a post by rumster:

What about your ISP?

Edit: I use my ISP's SMTP server for all outgoing e-mails and my hosting company for POP3 (and IMAP) access to my mailboxes. I use WebFaction. It's a little more expensive that HostGator, but I like the service that I get.

I use my ISP's at home, which is fine. However if I'm away and use my phone or laptop, I am via a different connection so can't use it. These are the situations that I would like an alternative.

1and1 get my vote. Used them successfully for years.

I use www.verygoodemail.com

I run my own mail server. I have a low-power box (a Fit-PC) that sits in my study doing it all. I use VPOP3 running on Windows 7 and it's rock solid. Costs me £10 every two years for the domain. About £1 a month electricity.

I wanted the Ent version so I could have IMAP and TLS (and IPv6 if/when Plusnet ever get off their [censored] and provide it) so that's another £80 every couple of years. The Home version is cheaper (I thought it was now free but I appear to be wrong).

Edited by Andrue (Tue 26-Apr-16 18:34:08)

I use www.verygoodemail.com

Catchy name, I wonder how they came up with that ?

Better than reversing his surname

If you are using all your domains along with email accounts for all of them and it is all hosted on the single server/host then they will end up possibly getting flagged as mass emailing and then blocked.

We own a Rack Server located in a datacentre and have several domains owned by different people on our server that we provide webspace and an email service for.

This worked great for a while and then started to get flagged and blocked and was given a 5xx error code stating we have been flagged as mass emailing.
We was like scratching our heads for a while thinking we are not mass emailing nothing, but in a way we are, if a server is hosting more than 1 mail service and is sending emails from each of those, its classed as mass emailing, even if its only 1 email a week per domain.

What we had to do is set up some SPF (Sender Policy Framework) domain records to say that the IP of the server is allowed to send emails for X domains.
Once that's set up correctly it all starts to work again.

Try reading this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework

Hope that helps.

*** changes underlined ***

Paul

Edited by PaulKirby (Wed 27-Apr-16 03:06:49)

<waves>

Iain

Someone has to!

Seriously though - we do provide rather good email platforms (yes, I'm biased ) - subject to minimum order volume of 5 mailboxes. We don't provide a stand alone SMTP service for the purposes of sending only.

Hope that makes sense?

Did someone mention Nildram? Happy days...

Iain

While my daughter was at uni and now working away from home
I used google.com SMTP server =
smtp.gmail.com
port 587
on her laptop and that has worked well for the last five years.
at home we all use our isp SMTP server.

See . https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how...

Edited by APTMAN (Wed 27-Apr-16 14:46:55)

Thanks to all for some useful comments and things to try.

Andrue, Nice to hear of someone else using Vpop3. Just so you know the latest version works perfectly on Windows 10. I upgraded my very old version (home) after deciding to shut down my mail machine and just run it on the PC I use for everything else and it is working like a dream.

packetman, I send though my ISP, having set the email address in my mail client(s) to match the domain, seems to work perfectly and avoids the spam designation.

Edited by philippercival (Thu 28-Apr-16 13:04:01)

+1 for SPF on my domain, did exactly the same, was able to send without any 5xx errors.

Also stopped getting the bounce back spam emails for my domain into the domain bucket email account

In reply to a post by iand:

+1 for SPF on my domain, did exactly the same, was able to send without any 5xx errors.

Also stopped getting the bounce back spam emails for my domain into the domain bucket email account

Yeah, like I said we was like [censored], we even tried DKIM where we would hash up the email, but then realised that would only help to detect if anyone tampered with the email etc.

But with SPF that is saying that the reverse domain lookup for the actual IP address of the server that is doing the actual sending of the email is allowed to send you emails.

So the OP will have to set up one or two DNS records for the domain of the server that is sending the actual emails i.e. the reverse lookup of the IP of the server, then a DNS records for each domain that is having the emails being send by the server.

But yeah, that sorted our email being flagged as spam, as well as stopping the 5xx error codes and now none of our emails are being stopped.

For my Game Dev Stuff which contains certain information I then Hash some of the email fields that I don't want the man in the middle or 3rd parties to alter using DKIM.

So end result, I am happy, our users are happy and our users that we host web and emails services for are happy

Paul

In reply to a post by packetman:

I use my ISP's at home, which is fine. However if I'm away and use my phone or laptop, I am via a different connection so can't use it.

Who is your ISP? Most ISPs' SMTP is usable home and away with suitable jiggling with its port.