This isn't necessarily a programming question just yet but is a question that many programmers at corporations might be able to answer.
My company recently switched over to Office 365. We have a "noreply" email that sends out emails whenever our customers request work. The limit for Office 365 is 30 emails per minute or 10,000 emails a day. Currently the messages are being marked as spam and will not be delivered due to these restrictions. To over come this we have heard of services like mail chimp and mail gun but by visiting their websites I wasn't able to immediately infer on how to do this.
Can anyone provide some details on how they would overcome this situation? Also is your solution one that can be applied directly to Office 365 and the email or is it something that would require code change on the server sending emails (Using SMTP to send them).
It is not possible to change this restriction in Office 365. To quote Microsoft:
"Exchange Online customers who need to send legitimate bulk commercial
email (for example, customer newsletters) should use third-party
providers that specialize in these services."
What you can do is use a provider like Sendgrid or any other 3'rd party SMTP relay provider.
The provider will give you an SMTP hostname that you can point your code towards as sending server. What method of authentication to use will depend on the provider.
It is important to remember that if your domain uses SPF (which is highly recommended) that you include the new providers systems in your SPF record to ensure that it is not marked as spam.
Related
I'd like to send emails programmatically via SendGrid (from admin#mydomain.example.com), but have replies to that email come to my Google Workspaces inbox for admin#mydomain.example.com). I would then like to reply to the customer from Google Workspaces.
The closest question related to this I could find is Setup | G Suite + Sendgrid for transactional email, but that was a fairly different use-case.
So in my usecase, emails to the customer would come from admin#mydomain.example.com via EITHER SendGrid or Google Workspaces.
Here's a article from MailGun that talks about a similiar pattern
My questions:
Will this result in deliverability issues, having emails sometimes come with different signing keys/domains? I don't understand email signing particularly well.
Is there anyway to have replies to the email address go to BOTH SendGrid and Google Workspaces, so I'll have it in my inbox but can also get it posted to a webhook by SendGrid? I think the answer is no, but figured I'd ask.
Any other considerations I should keep in mind for this strategy? Is this a poor idea for some reason?
Thanks!
Yes, this will result in deliverability issues. You should use the same domain for both sending and receiving.
No, you can't have replies go to both. You can have replies go to a webhook, but you can't have them go to both a webhook and a mailbox.
Final consideration: This is a poor idea. You should use the same domain for both sending and receiving. If you want to use SendGrid, you should use SendGrid for both sending and receiving. If you want to use Google Workspaces, you should use Google Workspaces for both sending and receiving. You can't use both at the same time.
Another consideration: If you're sending a lot of emails, you might get flagged as a spammer if you're sending from multiple domains.
The company I work for does something similar that might be helpful for your scenario.
We have a number of systems that send emails via SendGrid e.g. Auth0, Salesforce, various bespoke systems, etc. Some of these use native integrations to SendGrid, some use SMTP relaying, and others send emails programatically via the SendGrid API.
We've implemented sender auth (i.e. DKIM) in SendGrid for our domain e.g. mydomain.example.com, but we don't handle replies in SendGrid as we want replies to go to a different system - specifically our contact center system (which is the main systems our help desk staff use). Help desk staff would then reply to emails from within the contact center system. Note: we needed to configure DKIM for both SendGrid as well as the contact center system (as both currently send emails from mydomain.example.com), but in the future the intent was to implement a SMTP relay in the contact center system (to SendGrid) so that all sending goes through SendGrid.
I'm a bit fuzzy on the fine-grained implementation details of how we handle replies, but essentially we point the (single) MX record for mydomain.example.com to a third-party email protection system which scans the emails and forwards them to Office 365 mailboxes which subsequently forwards them to our contact centre system. I believe Office 365 is really only there for email posterity. AFAIK you should be able to point the MX record to anything that can handle SMTP.
In your scenario you should be able to configure the MX record for the mydomain.example.com domain to point at your Google Workspaces. This will allow you to send emails from SendGrid and use Google Workspaces to handle the sending and receiving of replies.
Not sure if you can configure SMTP relaying in Google Workspaces (i.e. to relay through SendGrid), but this would mean you'd only need to configure DKIM for SendGrid. All emails would be sent by SendGrid and replies would be go to Google Workspaces.
I registered G-Suite free long ago for my domain. We use Google Drive for file sharing and emails under that domain. Recently Google seems forcing me to upgrade to their pay plan. They list some of our key emails to spam list so that those email can't send mail to group. It also list some of our partners emails to spam list so that they can't send mail to email group under our domain.
Google suggests that in order to manage spam list sending to a group under domain, we have to upgrade to a pay plan.
As we have many users, the pay plan will be too expensive. So I'm thinking to run my own mail server, however still want to use google drive for file sharing within users in domains.
I would like to ask if there will be any issue if I change MX records to my own email server and keep using G-Suite free for file sharing with google drive ?!
Thanks,
Klab
The answer to your question is "it depends". Your split brain approach absolutely does work. We have exactly that configuration where we have some MX records going to on-prem, some going to gmail AND THEN to on-prem and some going only to gmail. The mails flow well and users get their email. The reason that I say "it depends" is that it depends on what you mean by issue. There's no issue with mail delivery, but there are issues with management. For example ideally you will have domainA.com for your email and domainB.com for your Gsuite and keep them separate: you don't have to do this obviously, but I wish we had. If you must have only domainA.com with domainA registered as your GoogleID but not with your MX record it will work, but it will probably end up with a headache when you get a problem in two years when userX's emails don't arrive and you have to track through where they go. That may not be an issue for you, but if you end up with 100 sub domains and 100K users then it's irritating to say the least.
You have other options with GSuite Enterprise and I assume Free, you can route all your inbound emails from a mail gateway see the docs so you can have both. Your inbound mails hit your Exchange server which then forwards to GSuite, or you can set up mail routes doc to forward all your inbound emails to your Exchange server, so you keep your MX record as Google and then your forward those mails to Exchange, then you reply from Exchange and the recipient replies back to Google. We do that too. It does work, insofar that the mail is delivered but it gets confusing to debug issues. But if you must have only one domain and you have to split up users then it's one approach.
You also configure a non-Gmail mailbox see doc which routes all your messages to, say, Exchange.
However, before you do, I'd look more into the Gsuite anti-spam features. You can customise some of the Google spam filtering. See doc . You can't customise all of it: we have had hangouts with the Google spam team who (eventually) explained some of their internal workings and there are some spam messages that you simply can't get delivered because the spam filter is applied before the GSuite level. Most business-type spam, rather than the nasty malware or "adult" spam, though is managed at the Gsuite level and you can disable it by domain if you wish. Differentiating between what Google thinks is spam and what the business thinks is spam still crops up for us from time-to-time.
To address your core issue of spam emails not being delivered to your group, I do not know about the free tier: we have the Enterprise tier, but on the assumption that the Groups configuration is the same (which it may not be but if it is) you can configure message moderation docs for a group. You can set "spam messages" to "skip the moderation queues". We have done that where, as with you, legitimate mails get classed as spam because they come from, say, automated services. We have also in cases removed the "archive" ability so the group is really only a mail distribution list and that bypassed the moderation for us.
I enclose a screenshot of the Enterprise Groups moderation options page from the control panel so you can see what we get in Enterprise and if it's different from what you get in Free Tier
We are hosting customer data on behalf of companies/clients, and one of our tasks is to send out a very specific transactional email from us (with our email address as sender and reply-to) to clients customers.
We are trying to move away from storing the personal part of a customers data, including his email address. Of course, in order to be able to send out an email to a customer we need to at some point have access to the email address, but in our view it's a step in the right direction to retrieve the email address from the client during a session instead of retreiving it from our own database.
The problem now is that our unwillingness to have email addresses stored anywhere rules out using email service providers like Sendgrid. Instead we need to send out lots of emails through our own server, and this might hurt deliverability. I've been looking for a kind of "self hosted Sendgrid". One who will enable us to send bulks of emails, and one we can tweak to not store the sent emails.
One solution I've found is sendy.co who defines themselves as:
Sendy is a self hosted application that runs on your web server.
This sound promising, but then I read that emails are sent through Amazon's cloud:
Sendy uses multi-threading to send emails via Amazon SES.
I suppose this leads us back where we started, because then Amazon is storing the email addresses.
As I understand, the high deliverability that ESPs achieve is not only caused by state-of-the-art email headers, but also by their servers being recognized by Google/Gmail, Microsoft and other email hosts. So maybe a high deliverability just isn't possible without an ESP. But is there an alternative approach that lets us acheive relativly high deliverability without needing to involve a 3rd party server to do the sending?
The reason that people tend to pay for this service is because it is reasonably difficult/complicated/time consuming. If sending this email is a core part of your business, you'll want to hire a deliverability engineer to handle this. If it's not, I'd start by contacting the various transactional ESPs and see if you can find one that has an enterprise offering they're willing to tailor to this use case.
I think that I'm a little late to this. I hope that you figured out your question by now.
If you haven't then:
One alternative that you can try is to host your own server with an on-premise option. I would check out SocketLabs Hurricane MTA.
SocketLabs is a cloud ESP, like Sendgrid. But they also have a powerful on-premise option.
https://www.socketlabs.com/blog/introducing-hurricane-mta-3-0/
We are involved in the project which is designed to gather UK hotels details that our client needs to create a paper guide with most popular and top rated places in the country.
At the begining of each year we automatically send emails out to hotel owners in order to ask them to update their hotel details.
Unfortunately Client reported that some of hotels never received any of the emails nor that email ended up in spam, especially on hotmail mailbox.
Is there any known approach which could help us to overcome that situation?
One of the solutions we tried was to resign from local SMTP server and purchase external SMTP server on turboSMTP, but without effect.
How would you advise us to you deal with that problem or what have you advised to other companies in the past? Surely there must be a way to resolve that problem completely and we would appreciate your prompt help with that.
Sending an email to multiple recipients within the same company may sometimes have that effect. That company’s email firewall often assumes it’s a spam attack.
There's a lot of factors that come into this. Thankfully, by going for an external SMTP relay, you can offload most of the issues to them.
What you can do, is make sure your domain and emails are configured to increase their validity. Two really key things for this:
SPF records
DKIM signing
SPF
SPF is basically a whitelist of IPs that can send email for your domain. SPF records are added to your DNS server. There are plenty of SPF generators online that can help (like this one). Your SMTP provider will also need to be included in your SPF record.
DKIM
DKIM digitally signs your email to verify that it's been sent by an authorised sender. Your SMTP provider will have info on how to set that up (turboSMTP docs).
If you want to explore more, I recommend Jeff Atwood's (co-founder of SO) article on how horrible email is: http://blog.codinghorror.com/so-youd-like-to-send-some-email-through-code/
I'm using my Google Apps account (Standard version) to send single emails (automatically) to real interested customers.
The problem is that my sender email account has been suspended, because it's been considered as a "spammer" by Google.
What can I do in order to send that kind of emails from now on? I use MailChimp to send massive emails, and I've seen it has an API, called STS, for sending single emails, but it also required an Amazon SES account, so I don't know whether to invest on those services or doing something else.
What do you recommend for this case?
You should try a service that specializes in sending "transactional" emails, such as Sendgrid, Postmarkapp and Mailjet.
They have APIs and libraries for most programming languages, but in your case you just need to configure the SMTP server they rovide in your email client and you're good to go. They help you not get into the spam folder of your recipients, and help make sure you don't get flagged as a spammer
With most of them you should get some prettty powerfull analytics as well, which is a nice bonus.