I would like to know if there is a way how I can send e-mails with preferabel php or JS without needing an actual mail server. I am pretty sure it won't work, but have any of you an idea how there could be a way?
You can send mail with a lot of services, I believe they are called 'exchange' mail services. Gmail, outlook (or live, hotmail) are examples of these services. Google is full of examples :-)
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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.
I am modifying my website so users will be able to send an email through our webform.
Everything is written in PHP.
I will be using standard mail() function (PHP) and as I understand it will use local smtp server to send an email (this is sendmail, right?).
Should I maybe use SMTP server to send those emails?
I am asking because using standard mail() function it will use local server (Debian Linux 6.0) and I never really used it... I just want to be sure that all of those emails will get throu.
You have to keep some standards for sending emails in mind but then it will work fine:
set a RDNS entry for the IP you are sending the emails from
your email server must be not an open relay
don't send emails to users who didn't opt in to your email list via double opt in proceeder
your server IP need to be nowhere blacklisted
If you are sending a lot of emails (like 5000 emails and more) you should use a special service for that. A shared hosting plan or a VPS won't be a good idea for that amount of emails.
I always use PHP mailer. Its very easy to configure. Refer http://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/email/send-email-from-a-page/using-phpmailer-to-send-mail-through-php
Delivering mail is not an easy subject. If you don't want to dive into it, http://mandrill.com/ is a great solution. They offer a great free plan, and they manage all the deliverability issues for you.
We use Mandrill on all our new projects. We were using SendGrid, which is also good, but is more expensive (and not better).
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.
I have set up several email accounts on my vps hosting but I can't receive any emails that are send via php from another hosting. Everything works fine when I send emails from gmail for example, I receive them without a trouble. Does anyone know any reason why emails sent from php can't be received?
Try using phpmailer, it's a good mailing class which automatically sets well defined headers so that the mail is more likely to not land in the spam folder.
Sounds like a spam filter issue. Have you set up a proper Sender ID/SPF framework in your domain name service so that the host appears to be a valid MTA for this domain? Look here for a detailed explanation of Sender ID/SPF/DKIM, etc.
Check your spam folder.
GMail is able to differenciate if a mail has been sent from outlook for example or an automated application. (I dont know how, but they can). If i send an email from my work account to GMAil works, if its a web app or executable with the same email adress, it ends up on the spam folder.
How do I use Google Apps' email services to send mail using the CodeIgniter email class? The email class seems to prefer SMTP, and I was going through the clients Google Apps account. I can't find any place within the Google Apps settings for SMTP. Does anyone know of a solution for this issue?
Right you don't find it because CodeIgniter uses the "mail" PHP function.
For some reasons only the most drunken PHP core developer knows about - this function do not support SMTP and worse even the admin can't configure SMTP usuage on Unix (it is possible to do this on windows - making the PHP design look even more crazy).
There are a few SMTP libraries out there that can handle SMTP Email, just use them
http://pear.php.net/package/Mail
http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpmailer/
http://swiftmailer.org/
or the Email classes from the Zend Framework which are uncoupled from the rest so easy to use with CodeIgniter.
Here is a blog post detailing instructions:
http://joelg.info/sending-email-with-gmail-using-the-codeignite
Extract From link:
Why send email with Gmail rather than
the server's SMTP configuration? There
are a number of advantages I see for
doing this: Ability to develop locally
and test email sending functionality
without going to lengths to setup a
local mail server. Ability to utilise
Google Apps emails to send email from
emails which are on your own domain.
Ability to have a reference of the
mail you send using this method in the
"sent" folder on your Gmail account.