OK, I'm not sure this question even belongs here but here goes...
I have an email server running Postfix and Dovecot and a couple of mailboxes there. Using third party email services like Gmail or Outlook I've noticed they fetch an avatars for some emails. Question is how can I attach an avatar to my own mailboxes on my own server such that others will recognize them? Is this a part of mail protocols that I can set up somehow or should I use any third-party services?
Avatars are handled by mail client, not mail server. Gmail fetchs google+ avatars for #gmail.com and outlook fetchs avatar from a Microsoft global exchange address book.
AFAIK there is no protocol for email avatars and no easily possible 3rd party integration into gmail or outlook.
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To learn about email and SMTP, I wrote a basic SMTP client using sockets to push an email to my outlook account, following an example from a textbook.
I ran into a hiccup though, when the outlook mail server required me to authenticate before I could send the email. After researching the issue, I learned this is to prevent mass email spam and sender spoofing, which makes sense. I resolved this by authenticating using my outlook email and sending the email to myself.
My follow up questions that I'm having trouble finding an answer to are:
If a different mail server, such as google, needs to push an email to my outlook inbox, how does it authenticate? Does the google mail server have an account with outlook?
Is it not possible to just send mail between any two mail servers? Do the mail server admins need to white list other email servers first?
Found my answer here: How to send a mail directly to SMTP server without authentication?
Turns out, I was not connecting to an external SMTP server for outlook, but rather a server for users to perform actions with their outlook account specifically.
Suppose I own an email 'demo#gmail.com'. Now, I create a new Microsoft account using my existing email. Thus I get another email 'demo#gmail.com', but this one is served by Microsoft.
So the situation is: one email and two providers.
If I send a hello email to 'demo#gmail.com' using my personal SMTP server, to which of the above will it send: will it send to the one hosted by Microsoft or the one hosted by Google?
How does it solve such an ambiguity? What are the factors that influence this?
This is a very common problem because many providers are giving us an option to create a new account using our existing email.
My observations:
I saw the emails inside the inboxes of both the services. I found that they had completely different emails.
There was no email which was common to both the inboxes. So there must be some mechanism to deal with it.
Let us look at the problem the other way round: If I had an email 'demo#outlook.com' initially and I created a new Google Account with this email address, then:
An email sent to this email address from another gmail account goes to the Google's server. An email sent to this email address from an Outlook also goes to the Google's servers.
There are two different ways of looking up an email. The 'normal' way:
You send an email to an server, in this example gmail.com.
Your mail delivery agent looks for mx record of gmail.comand send it to the ip-address of gmail.com.
If an email is delivered locally by the domain outlook.com it perhaps doesn't lookup the mx record, but lookups in a local database if the email-address exist there, and sends it to the ip-address of the outlook.com.
I think in the inbox of outlook.com are only microsoft emails.
More details can be found at https://www.socketlabs.com/blog/smtp-email-delivery/
I spent weeks on researching the net on wich solution should I use in order to correctly send emails from my websites hosted on shared hosting accounts, but the more I read - the more confused I get.
So this is my situation!
I have among others, an ecommerce website built on OpenCart, on a shared hosting account and a few email addresses in cPanel, like sales#mydomain.com, newsletter#mydomain.com, contact#mydomain.com, etc. These email accounts are also accessible via roundCube by the user at email.mydomain.com and via IMAP\SMTP on their email clients like Thunderbird.
The website has these email addresses set up and it uses (at leas Opencart does) php mail() to send emails for events (new order, contact, quote, etc).
Since last year or so, providers like Yahoo keeps banning the server's IP address and emails get bounced back with failure messages, Gmail recipients get them in Spam folder, etc. I almost monthly ask my hosting provider to change IP address, ask Yahoo or spam services to unblock the IP address, do tests, etc and I don't even have a large number of emails going, like 100 per month, most of them are Ask for a quote wich are plain text messages.
In other words, it isn't working.
What I am looking for what solution should I use to send emails from websites hosted on shared accounts, that is transactional emails and newsletter emails without upsetting Yahoo,Google,etc. subdomains? external smtp service? configure email accounts in a specific way? What do you guys use ?
If you are able to add extensions to Opencart on your shared host, you may want to consider adding the phpmailer extension (http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=extension/extension/info&extension_id=3932). This will enable you to send all outgoing mail from Opencart via phpmailer, which can be setup to send mail through a remote SMTP relay (such as smtp.gmail.com, sendgrid, or some other remote SMTP relay). A reputable remote SMTP relay will probably be less likely to be blacklisted than your host's SMTP relay that the php mail() command is currently using.
I want my fellow workers in my company, able to connect to work mail from home,
we are able to retrieve the mails through outlook express but not thunderbird.
So our employees using thunderbird can't retrieve these emails.
Is there any fix for this?
You could you outlook.com's web based interface to connect to POP3 accounts, similar to what you do in outlook express.
Similarly you could add your email as additional account in gmail too.
I am a student at Kennesaw State University. The college email is connected with GMail as the web client, but I cant find a way to connect the PoP (or IMAP, even though PoP is the only one Outlook stated) servers to Outlook (or any other clients). I want to do this so I can have one universal client for all of my mail accounts.
There are many... http://www.k-state.edu/its/zimbra/help/email_clients/ol2003.html http://www.k-state.edu/its/zimbra/help/email_clients/ol2007.html
..."official" guides on how to do this, but no one has had any luck. I want to not only receive, but send emails from this account.
Has anyone had any luck doing this (I think some companies use the same google GMail set-up).
I would like to add that there is the same issue with Zimbra.