I'm using the Mailhost object in Zope to send emails from forms or scripts in different websites, with the "Use mail queue" setting set.
In the last weeks, I began experiencing problems with lots of emails not being sent but remaining in the mailqueue folder.
I'm not sure what's the cause, probably some problems with the used smtp servers (some mails get sent, some don't), but that's not the question I'm about to ask.
I'd like to know if there is a way of manually resending (or trying to) the timed-out mails in the mailqueue folder.
Related
I have a basic question about mail servers. Usually any general server (not necessarily mail servers) handle all kinds of related requests i.e. both direction interaction with client (like sending and receiving msg to and from client) but in case of mail servers, there are 2 different servers -- one for outgoing messages called outgoing server following SMTP protocol and another for incoming messages called incoming server following POP3/IMAP protocol. Why so? . For that matter couldn't the 2 protocols be accommodated in one single protocol to handle both direction message flow. Also, typically are these 2 servers hosted on same machine in a general business?
Because the protocols are old. In the old Unix tradition, and ignoring UUCP for now:
SMTP came first, to transfer mail between sites, and mail was read locally on the server/network using a text mode client when logged in. There was no need to fetch mail, you used the 'mail' command, and it accessed your local mail spool (a file containing your mail, sitting on the file system, that the SMTP server appended to).
Later on, came the development that people wanted to read mail on their own hosts so a protocol was invented to serve that. The POP server would read that same spool file, and allow you to download all your messages to your intermittently connected client computer. SMTP was reused for sending mail because it already existed and was easily adapted for that purpose.
These days, there are usually three servers of note: SMTP submission server, SMTP transmission server, and IMAP. The submission server is where end users of the service submit their e-mail to be forwarded onto the final host, for example the Google server a Gmail user submits their email to (on port 465 or port 587, usually, with authentication). The transmission server is responsible for delivering and receiving email between sites (eg. when Yahoo and Gmail exchange mail for their customers with each other, on port 25). And IMAP is used by an end user to fetch their email.
These three services, on large sites, are generally served by separate servers on separate hosts. On very large services, like Gmail, they are separate pools of servers.
On a small business host, they were often just one machine.
There are newer and more integrated protocols. For example, both EAS and EWS have mail fetch and submission contained in the same protocol.
Personally, I regret that almost nobody uses UUCP anymore :)
The separation of shipping, management and collection of mail has a historical, philosophical and design basis.
This is in line with the spirit of the Unix world: "do one thing but do it right" and "make everything as simple as possible".
How complex the issue of e-mail is and how much technology it covers, read here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email
and then see the relevant RFCs in the footnotes for details.
It is difficult to implement a monolithic program that takes into account all the nuances of e-mail and at the same time
keeping it simple (Simple in SMTP). Such a monolith would be a nightmare to develop, maintain and administer,
and the post office has changed many times since the 1970s.
As for the second question, there is no reason to use the same physical machine, but there are also no contraindications other than the amount of resources available.
So I have a strange question here, maybe it's impossible but I hope some people are able to guide me on how to do this.
Me and my parents are running a business and are getting over 50 mails a day on 3 different mail boxes, and on a desktop this is fine but they are using tablets too to read these but the problem is that there isn't enough space to save all those mails offline.
So when they need some information from a client they need to go to the online mail panel and search there, but the searching is easier on Outlook than on Roundcube.
Is there a way to setup a local server that will stock all the mails, and when we search for a mail he temporary gets that mail from the server and deletes it after a few minutes from the tablet?
A client is moving from their old hosting to mine. They have a few email accounts on the old hosting and I want to move all the emails on the old hosting to mine. How can I do this? If I download them with POP can I then upload them to the new hosting?
The answer depends on the mail server that you are using. Yes, you can download all the mail messages with POP3, but the upload to your mail server will depend on the type of mail server. I am not aware of any mail servers that provide a tool to import mail messages.
Most mail servers store the email message in a file, and you can certainly drop the files in the folder where they are stored, but that does not mean that it will be visible, you will have to deal with how the mail server index those files.
I suggest looking at the specifications for your mail server.
If you access both accounts with IMAP (most hosts support this now) instead of POP, you can literally drag and drop the messages between folders/inboxes for the two email accounts.
Also, depending on the type of hosting they're moving from/to, you may be able to use a feature of your new server's control panel to do the importing...unless you're doing it manually on a vanilla VPS or dedicated. There are still options, but you'd need to confirm here how your new server is setup and what the old server looks like.
If you're only talking about a couple of accounts with a few folders each, you may just want to consider IMAP as your path of least resistance. The transfer will primarily depend on your own Internet connection, as most hosting companies have connections faster than yours.
Lastly, if both servers share a similar format for the mailbox, you might want to just rsync the email over to the new server (assuming you have root access on both servers) to the proper email directory. Depending on the email box format, you may be able to simply run a server command to "convert" the mailbox to the format your server is expecting.
I'm on Ubuntu Intrepid, using Postfix and SpamAssassin. I've seen approaches using procmail (like the one suggested # Apache), but I'm looking for a solution that does not use procmail.
This is a programming question because the correct answer will be some form of code that accomplishes the task at hand (my response to the negative votes).
UPDATE to the situation: I used this tutorial and it worked out excellently: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PostfixAmavisNew
It really depends at which level you want to delete the spam:
At the mail client level, using Email client rules (like the ones available in Thunderbird) is easy: just set a rule that delete any email marked as SPAM in the subject.
At the user level, if mail is received automatically by the machine, you could set some cron job that periodically inspect the local mailbox and again delete mails marked as SPAM.
It's easy if your local store uses maildir since each email is just a file, as opposed to the mbox format which would require some more work since it's a single file.
Setting up maildir for postfix is trivial.
At the server level, using Amavisd will allow you to have more control over how mail is handled.
Amavisd has threshold settings where you can define an evasive action depending on the spam score given by spamassassin.
For instance, anything above 15 points is put in quarantine and anything above 30 points is deleted.
There are some instructions for installing Amavisd on Ubuntu.
The point is, as far as I know, spamassassin's job is to identify and give spam points to emails. How you want these to be handled is not up to spamassassin but the other modules down the chain.
We run a large online community in the Netherlands. Because of that we send a lot of mail to the hotmail email addresses of our members.
Recently we have noticed that not all mail is reaching our members, because we have hit a certain limit or so it seems.
Google doesn't give a solution (yet) but we see a lot of others having the same problem.
Note, We have added (since long) SPF records for our domain, in TXT and SPF types.
What else can we do to tackle this problem?
// Ryan
To add to what bzlm said, hotmail probably isn't rejecting your mails, so much as trying to use rate-limiting to prevent spam. That said, there are a few potential solutions you could use here. You could contact hotmail and see about getting your mailserver exemption status from their rate-limiting. Depending on the size of your community, they may or may not respond to you or be willing to work with you. I suggest this only as the "diplomatic" solution.
Or, you could set up two mail servers; one for hotmail users, and one for everybody else. I know from some of the sites that I run that a lot of people register with hotmail accounts, mostly because everybody has one which they use as a "spam dump" for online services where they don't want to use their real email address. So, as you no doubt realize, the number of hotmail users in your database represents a fairly substantial percentage. Therefore, when you need to send an email, you could determine whether to send it to your normal SMTP server, or your hotmail-designated one. On the hotmail SMTP service, you'd need to add some type of waiting mechanism to sleep a certain amount of time after receiving a 421 response.
The problem with this idea is that the number of hotmail users you have, plus the delay you'll encounter in sending, means that the queue length might very well exceed the number of mails you must send. You could alleviate this problem by setting up secondary/tertiary servers, preferably on other networks... but I'm getting ahead of myself here. At any rate, I did a bit of googling around (as you probably have, too), and this isn't such an uncommon problem, but there is no obvious solution to it.
So likely, you'll either have to create some type of slightly-unorthodox network workaround, or try the "diplomatic" route and contact an organization unlikely to care about your problem. I'd suggest doing both in parallel. :)
421 means that the service is not currently available, and that the client should try again. This could be for any number of reasons, including trying to discourage you from too frequent mailing if Hotmail thinks you might be a spambot.
Why not simply let your outbound smtpd queue the mails and try again?
Why is "not all mail reaching your members"? Don't you try again if you get a 421 response?
EDIT: Do what sqook says.
The only real way to "get around" this is to become a good e-mail citizen. Make it easy for people to unsubscribe from your notifications, establish complaint feedback loops with the major mail providers, remove bouncing e-mails from your list automatically, don't send people e-mails they don't want to receive. Failing to adhere to these simple requirements makes you look like a spammer, and providers like Hotmail will treat you like one.
The mail server IP connecting to Outlook.com server has exceeded the rate limit allowed. Reason for rate limitation is related to IP/domain reputation. If you are not an email/network admin please contact your Email/Internet Service Provider for help.
https://mail.live.com/mail/troubleshooting.aspx
I advise you too wait some times