I have a question that I don't know if it is feasible. Here are the specs :
I have one server with domain www.mywebsite.fr hosted on A. But I have also a domain www.mywebsite.com located on B.
What I want is to use mail addresses mail#mywebsite.com and never use mail#mywebsite.fr. I already made mail forwarding, so that when people send mail to mail#mywebsite.com I automatically receive it on mail#mywebsite.fr. However, is it possible to send a response (or a more general mail) so that when I send from mail#mywebsite.fr it goes trough mail#mywebsite.com so the person receive a mail (the response) from mail#mywebsite.com.
Sorry if I was not clear enough, but if you understood my problem and that it only requires DNS configuration I would really appreciate any help from your side.
Best regards.
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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 don't understand this "reverse dns" thing at all.
So, I have a website - www.someurl.com, and I have an ip address - http://180.160.160.190 (fake).
Now, I want to setup a "reverse dns" thing, so that emails that I send out won't be marked as spam.
Questions!
why do i have to setup a "reverse dns" thing? What is it, and why do gmail, hotmail et al care about it?
all the examples online say I need to setup the "hostname" as mail.someurl.com (well, they say mail.domainname.com, but I cleverly solved for x). What the heck is a "hostname" and what is a "url"? The wikipedia page for hostname left me v. confused.
is a url a domain name? it sure isn't a hostname (i hope).
back to the mail.someurl.com hostname - why is it "mail" in the examples? Can I fecklessly set the value to "hello" or "mooseymooseymoose" (so it would be mooseymooseymoose.someurl.com)? Does it have any relevance to anything at all?
if i am sending emails out as no-reply#someurl.com, does that have any bearing on the first bit of the hostname? that is, should they come from "mail#someurl.com", given a hostname of mail.someurl.com?
cheers, andrew
It's an artificial requirement that was adopted under the assumption that spam servers wouldn't take the time to setup their rDNS (or wouldn't be able since they usually got setup in rogue environments like infected PC's), and legitimate servers would. There is no technical requirement to have a rDNS for the email protocol to work, and not every mail server does this check.
The hostname is the name of your machine within your internal network.
URL stands for uniform resource locator, it's the fancy name for stuff that looks like "http://www.google.com/page1/page2". a domain name is simply the base of the URL, for example google.com. It's always of the form domain.tld (domain name and top level domain like com, net, org)
Yes you can set it to anything you want. Mail protocol doesn't require you to hardcode the name to anything in particular. Ultimately, it's your domain's MX record that decides where the mail server handling its emails is located at, and you can point it to anything.
Not necessarily. Mail servers can send e-mails on behalf of several domains, a mail server isn't limited to sending emails from its hostname only. The "From" part of the e-mail header will tell the mail client where it's coming from.
Hope that helps clear up a few details.
Its to make sure that the email is coming from a verified source. Emails sent to anyone can display ANY email address on it, making it easy to spam and pish people. Thats why they use reverse DNS, to verify that the domain sending the email is yours.
I'm implementing an application in ruby on rails (although this is a minor detail) that needs to send emails. Everything works fine, but I'm surprised cause when the app sends a mail, as long as it's authenticated against the smtp server, the sender it's going to be whatever it's specified in mail from. My point is, I can authenticate in a smtp server with "myuser#mydomain.com" and "mypassword" and be able to send a mail in which the recipient would see whichever address I want as sender.
This doesn't make any sense for me, and I'm sure it can't be so easy. I know it's surely a completely silly question for most of you, but would really appreciate anyone could make it clear for me.
Cheers!!
You authenticate as a generic user, it is only an accident that your login name is similar to a mail address. And yes, usually you can send mail with any reverse-path (reverse-path is the address in the MAIL FROM SMTP command). This may be necessary, for example a list manager uses VERP and sends mails with many unique reverse-paths.
However, some mail servers and mail administrators do place restrictions on the reverse path and the address in the From header. Especially, if the server signs the message.
Moreover, if the receiving server checks SPF records, it is useless to impersonate a remote domain, even if it is allowed, because the mail will be rejected anyway (if the domain publishes an SPF DNS record).
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
Am developing and newsletter email software in vb.net for a friend, and he has asked me to add option to send email using dns servers,
How do i send an emai using dns server without smtp or imap?
Send email "using DNS servers" still uses SMTP. And it's generally a bad idea. Here's what it's about:
Usually, an email app (your own, Outlook, etc.) send mail using SMTP or similar protocol to a configured mail server. It could be a company's own server, or an ISP's server, or something like that. The mail may pass through various outgoing mail servers on its way out of an organisation, but at some point it hits a "boundary server" (There are pretty names for all these different types of server, but they're not important right now.)
This boundary server uses DNS to find the recipient's mail server and then sends the message (using SMTP) to that server. (I have omitted the details on purpose)
Sending email "using DNS" means that your app acts as a boundary server. It uses DNS to find the recipient's mail server and then sends the mail directly - rather than using any outgoing servers.
It's a bad idea for two reasons.
More and more ISPs block SMTP traffic that doesn't pass through their outgoing servers
More and more incoming servers validate the boundary server using various techniques. Your app is not likely to be accepted by these servers
Both of these issues are anti-spam countermeasures, so using this technique makes you look like a spammer, leaves many of your messages blocked, and is likely to get your IP address blacklisted.
Hopefully you can explain this to your friend so that they will understand that the "normal" way of sending mail is the only way to ensure that they don't get listed as a spammer.