Closed. This question needs to be more focused. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by editing this post.
Closed 4 years ago.
Improve this question
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'm using my own email server to send and receive my emails. Therefor I've set up a VPS at Tilaa.com which also acts as my webserver.
On the webserver I have DirectAdmin setup which takes care of my administrative things.
The problem is that I can receive and send emails but Outlook, Live and Hotmail refuse the receive any emails coming from my email server. Gmail does work f.e. ( Not even in junk folders )
When the receiver at Outlook/live or hotmail adds my email address to the safe list, emails do get through.
My domain is virtualfarmingworld.com
What I have done?
- Setup SPF record
- Setup DKIM record
- Setup A record mail.virtualfarmingworld.com to server IP 84.22.113.42
http://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=mx%3avirtualfarmingworld.com&run=toolpage#
Does anyone have any ideas?
Regards,
Ciryk Popeye
Ciryk,
Hotmail can be a bit tricky, if it's being blocked completely. Then most likely your IP is on their internal blacklist. If it's showing up in their SPAM folder it can be a number of reason. The headers from the email in Hotmail will tell you why it's in the SPAM folder.
Look for SRV:<value> PCL: <Value> and SCL: <Value>
PCL stands for Phising Confidence Level and SCL stands for Spam Confidence Level.
You should run your email through this Mail Tester, it really does point out a lot of issues. It may or may not solve the hotmail issue, but they have this inbox tester their that really awesome that will show you other places you're having issues mailing to. Keep in mind, the previous owner of the IP might of spammed from it and caused issues.
I also notice by helping a lot of people that after signing up to Microsoft Junk Mail Reporting System, wait a few days and then delivery results are better with hotmail. I did a scan on you IP and I think you did that already signed up?
You're also on this blacklist: http://www.dnsblchile.org/
Which is really easy to get off, normally takes a couple of hours after you filled out the form.
I have a website based on WordPress.
Every page has his own Contact form.
I am using Configure SMTP
+ Contact7
(SMTP is setup to user Gmail as a SMTP server).
After a while I'm curious why I am actually doing it this way.
Is Gmail that secure or it is only about SSL?
Is WP build in mail function secure (and good) enough to use it?
In total: what is the best way to make contact form in WordPress and avoiding my mails getting to the spam folder?
I was told that the solution descriped above (Gmail SMTP) is the best way, is it?
Well, the build-in mail function works fine for most uses, like sending "Password lost" or "New user registered" mails or even contact forms.
If you send more than just a few (can´t name a number) mails via contact forms, newsletters etc. you will probably want to use a mailserver for that, either an external one (GMail) or a properly configured internal one. They go much easier past spam protection because they are known for sending mails and are probably whitelisted at the big mail providers. Your webhost most probably is not and might be considered as spam very fast when he is sending mails regularly.
If you want to send a lot of mails in a short span of time you should probably go one step further and choose a service like Mailchimp or something similar for that. Their business is sending newsletters and so nobody (means the mail providers) wonders, when they have lots of mails incoming from one of those servers.
For your use case I would stick to SMTP via GMail, when it works fine for you. As you are not sending lots of mails in a short span of time you´ll have only little problems with getting rated as spam and you also have a trusted server sending those mails. Seems fine for me.
Was hoping for some ideas as to a service to which I can set up an inbound-only email system. In other words, I will have multiple users on the system, each can receive their own email... but at the moment... at this time, I am not focused on the ability to send or reply to messages, only receive them and send to the appropriate user. I looked into Postmark... They seem to have some great functionality.
CloudMailin Is another alternative. However there are effectively three options for setting up something like this.
Use an existing, traditional, email server and poll for the emails
Setup your own email server and create a script to run when you receive an email
Use a third party solution, as you've already mentioned.
I went through for of these for Rails a little while back here, but all the information is still relevant.
I sent 3 emails last week as replies from our website. None received them! One was yahoo, hotmail and an overseas domain. I am wondering if it's not a good idea to open a yahoo account with our domain name as the user just to reply to prospective buyers.
Your mail server's IP may have been black listed. This is common on shared servers.
http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
First, check dnsbl.info to see if your mailserver's IP is blocked by any of the blacklists. If they are, contact the blacklist administrator to investigate removing the block.
If your email is business critical, then you need to get a dedicated server with a white-hat hosting company, control over DNS to set up your SPF/SenderID record, and to register with the Hotmail, AOL and Yahoo postmasters for whitelisting and feedback loops. Most of these will only accept requests for dedicated servers, where you have 100% control over the email they send.
If you are using an online contact form, make people double-enter their email address and check the entries match - otherwise you'll have no end of typos, which are naturally undeliverable and frustrating for both you and your customers.
You could also try looking at gmail for domains. It's what I use and so far I haven't had a problem withany spam filters. Also make sure that you are not writing the content of the message to where a spam filter could flag it as spam. There's some guides on the net somewhere. I found out that by removing the word "free" from the message the emails started going though (before I was on gmail).