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In Cuba, web access is extremely censored, so I created a tool that allows more than 50,000 people to browse the Internet through email. Cubans send me an email with an URL in the subject line, and I email them back with the response. Read more at https://apretaste.com.
It was working like a charm, till the communist government of Cuba started blocking my emails. My solution was rotation.
I started with Amazon SES, and I was changing the domain each time it was blocked, but Amazon adds a header to all emails, and once they blocked the header no email from SES was able to reach Cuba any more. The same happened with Mailgun and others, they all add headers.
Currently I am creating Gmail accounts and sending via SMTP, but Google blocks me for no reason and only allows to send 100 emails a day per account. Also I can only create few emails using the same IP address/phone, so I was forced to use anonymous proxies and fake Chinese phones. Now I am fighting a war on two fronts.
An email can be blocked by three parameters: IP address, domain, and email address.
It will be terrific if I can set up my own Postfix server at a VPS that auto-rotates the IP address. Even better if I can simulate "gmail.com", to avoid purchasing a new domain every day.
All the intents to create what I call "the ultimate sender" just either reach the spam folder or add unwanted headers making it too easy to block. I feel exhausted. I hit a knowledge barrier here.
I know I am crossing to the dark side, but this is for a very good cause. Thousands count on this service as their only source of unbiased news, social network and to feel part of the 21st century.
Can you please help me implementing "the ultimate sender", or pointing to another solution that I may be missing?
I have a few suggestions for you.
The first one relies on The Onion Router also known as Tor.
Since you are crossing to the dark side, why not also take a look into the darknet?
Take a look at this list of Tor email providers. If you have your own email server that can be accessed through Tor, it becomes much harder for anybody to stop people from using this service. After all, Tor was developed to offer people uncensored access to the web.
You can read about Tor in detail here, it uses Onion Routing and this is how you would set up your server to use Tor.
Here is an example how you could use it:
The steps that involve the setup, receiving an URL request and sending back the reply are as follows:
Set up an email server.
Configure your email server to use Tor.
Publish the public service name. (e.g. "duskgytldkxiuqc6.onion")
Deploy a client that takes the service name and a URL, and let it send an email with a request to your server.
The client now waits for a reply.
You send a reply and the client receives it.
You can change your service name on a regular basis, but you need to make it accessible to those who will use this service.
Having an own email server means being able to control the email header.
Here is one example how you could make use of it:
Configure your email server so that it receives and recognizes
emails which contain the requested URLs.
Before you send a reply modify the email header so that it shows a random IP address and a random sender email address including a random domain name.
Send your reply.
Sending an email that way means that you cannot be replied back to. But since your reply already contains the requested information there is no need to.
I hope this helps.
Crowd source it.
Find a way that volunteers can send some emails for you. This is the only long term approach that I can think of. A simple web interface with mail to links would be be enough to get started although there are other potential problems with this approach too.
Because you are talking about low numbers of users, you could also use crowdsourcing to create the single email address per person approach. They can create an account on a specific set of email providers and give you the credentials. This would allow the single email per user approach or could be used to rotate through a large set of email accounts to send emails.
The simplest solution is perhaps to set up a local SMTP server on your own computer. You don't even need a server per se.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/winsmtpserver/
There are many other such applications. They are usually used to test SMTP functions during local development, but there is nothing against actually sending spam through them.
I know this would be quite a large task, but how about pairing the users with one or just a few emails so they always receive an email from that email.
I'd assume people wouldn't have more than 100 queries per day, if so they could start receiving them from a backup email
I'd imagine it would look less suspicious for them to appear to be in constant contact with one unique email rather than 50,000 being in contact with one
I know this would be a huge undertaking, but I feel like it solves your issue.
Since the users are willing to receive emails form you then your shouldn't be blocked.
When you mentioned you are getting block does it mean your mail is going in spam or is getting lost in between sending and receiving or it is getting bounced back??
My suggestion would be to setup your own mail server and follow as below:
-Get approx 25 or more ip to rotate. (IP is the most imp part which is tracked and is accountable for the reputation of your mail server)
Don't start sending emails in bulk from the word go it is better to gradullay increase the email volume so that mail server reputation nicely built
keep changing the format of the email often
encourage user to add yourself to there contact list
your best part is user are willing to receive emails from you and you would reply to revived email is the USP of yours but still i will recommend you to register for FBL so that you would know which user is reporting you as spam and you can remove him from your list and never send him email again.
using best practice to send emails like dkim, SPF, dmarc are also vital.
Hope my answer was of some help to you. If you need step by step guide to step up mail server let me know.
My friend, do you remember what made Hillary Clinton lose the last elections to Trump?
It was the "mail" affair. And what was it? People discovered she shared confidential information through a non-official, non-governmental email account (i.e., she used some Gmail, Yahoo or another of a kind). Until here, nothing new with direct relation to your matters. But there is an small particularity on this history, and this can put, maybe not a solution, but maybe a light on a new path you could follow: Clinton actually never sent those emails; the email account she used had the password shared and the communication between people (Clinton-someone) occurred only using the drafts of the account.
How? One side logs in and accesses the drafts folder. There he/she reads the last message and edits it, cutting and writing new data - then save the draft message. On the next turn, the other side of the communication line logs in and do the same. And so forth, so never really sending those messages, but instead just updating the drafts (this "Hillary" method does schooled people... Dilma Rousseff, impeached ex-president of Brazil, actually did this method down there in Brazil too).
So, maybe if you could establish a pact with your user that he/she doesn't delete the account's password, you could pass those information by this method - without "really" exchanging emails. Maybe a "parent" email account (some that could reset a lost password) could be useful too.
Alternative: aren't you able to contract a regular HTTP webserver? You could rely on FTP to publish data to your user, he/she asks for it and you publish a page with that content.
Salvi, have you tried something with Telnet? OK, we are talking here about a text-only environment, but if nothing more would rest in the future, this could be better than nothing. Maybe you could implement a podcast-like, or push-like service based on it. Look what people do with it with references to your walk on the dark side...
If in Windows, open your command prompt.
Type telnet and press Enter.
Type "o" without quotes and press Enter.
Type "towel.blinkenlights.nl" without the quotes and press Enter.
I have written a couple of web sites that contain a "contact us" form.
However, our host recently switched SMTP off. Their excuse is "security issues".
The solution they offer is that they implemented rules whereby all mail generated from the platforms must be sent using the sendmail/phpmail functions and pass through a mail relay which checks the mails and their content and ensures malicious content and activity is completely blocked and they recommend I use "A virtual or dedicated solution".
I have no idea what it is they want me to do to get emailing working again and this is quite urgent as many clients are not getting their emails.
Is there an easy way to go around this in order to get emailing working again?
Many thanks in advance
It generally means that you will have to specify the new mail server they are providing instead of localhost in your code. Further, earlier, you were able to send the mail without authenticating but now on, you must have an account and you must authenticate before you send the mail. (I am not sure though, may be they allow relay to their own servers and you might not need authentication).
Go to the control panel of your hosting account and check for the mail panel. Check out the new smtp server name there and code your site to use this smtp server with credentials. This will let you send mail again.
Having problems with setting up my website to use MS Exchange to send emails. I dont want to use the hosts email system.
The MS Exhange has been set up, with email addresses created.
My webpages are using Persits.MailSender which the host supports.
Do i need to change MX records? A records?
Sorry, im not clued up with network side of things, any help would be appreciated
When i email direct, the email address on the exchange picks up the emails. BUT if i email through the website, it goes to the annoying webmail the host is provinding, and not to the exchange
I find this strange, the same email address receiving emails at different places!
Im using ASP, and I have a website set up, which has been sending emails for the last 12 months, the host has messed up (again) somewhere, but doesnt know what is wrong (as usual)
There are no errors, the email always gets sent.... but to the wrong place.
I would look into actually trapping and knowing your errors. That way you can see precisely why it fails and have something to work with. As it stands, your question isn't really answerable. No language nor framework is provided. We don't know if the mail server is confirmed to be working or accessible outside your netowrk; we don't know how your are referencing it or if you are passing user credentials; we don't know what error you're getting...
At this point, you're not debugging, you're just sort of swinging in the dark. Find the point of failure and then research that data point to get a solution. Debug, catch errors, log, step through your code. All good ideas.
Ok i figured it out, I deleted the mail domain on the host as that was the first place the website looks to send an email. Once the mail domain was deleted the emails were sent to the external hosted mailserver MS Exchange email address. Yay!
Just rebuilt a companies website, updated their A records to point to it's new server location but kept their email function as was.
Sending from the server works fine, and they receive mail from elsewhere fine but now when trying to send forms as emails to their existing addresses they never arrive.
For example trying to send an email (more specifically a Drupal Webform) from domain.com from Server 1 to email#domain.com on Server 2.
I've tried adjusting the send address from Server 1 which doesn't change anything. I think their IT person said something about receiving email at an exchange (Microsoft?) but I'm not savy this area at all.
Any ideas about this? I guess something is stopping it before it gets delivered (no spam) and the domains are conflicting, had a Google about but it's one of those where I'm not quite sure how to phrase the question. Thanks
SOLVED! In my CPanel I just needed to change my MX Entry to Remote Mail
Server Exchanger
I have a project to send some email to end clients. My client need to know what exactly "Email Client" they use to read the mail. I know a hidden can get the open event and even the user agent they use, so by parsing user agent i can get most email clients info.
But it's hard to detect some popular web mail clients like "Gmail", "Hotmail" and "Yahoo mail". Because user agent return is only the browser user agent string.
Edit: i think i need a result more like this:
here
You will not be able to perfectly detect the e-mail client your users are using.
In E-Mail headers some programs choose to include the X-Mailer tag, which tells you exactly with what program and version your user is sending the e-mail - of course that can be faked. Not all programs use the X-Mailer tag, I e.g. couldn't find it in a mail sent with Microsoft Outlook 2010.
Besides that you could do some guesswork by the Received from tag in the e-mail headers, but in the end you can use SMTP and POP3 with most webmailers like GMail or Yahoo. That means even though your e-mail is sent via servers from google.com, the originating client could still be Outlook or Thunderbird and not GMail itself.
Maybe we can help you if you better if you could tell us why exactly your client wants to know the programs the users use to read their mail? Probably to tune the appearance of newsletters?
I know this is a really old topic, but the most reliable way to detect webmail client for gmail, hotmail, outlook.com and office365 is to use a tracking pixel. What you will want to do is geo-locate the IP address and you'll find gmail all comes from mountain-view and microsoft based products from redmond.
I haven't validated this with non-US users, but I'd imagine the caching services they use will all be in the same place.
Cheers