in a recent project I integrated a custom Contact Form which uses the silverstripe Email Class. Unfortunately the sent E-Mails do not arrive at the client. It seems to depend on the host/domain of the target E-Mail Address. E.g. gmx does work (but spam), but receiving the mails on the E-Mail Address of the client does not work at all (hosted at united domains). Thanks,
Florian
The Email class in SilverStripe is admittedly not the greatest ;) But apart from potential lowlevel encoding errors, email delivery mainly depends on factors outside of SilverStripe.
You can start debugging mailservers, DNS records, spam headers, bounce emails, etc - but in the end its probably far easier to leave email delivery to a SaaS-provider like SendGrid or MailChimp. Both have offerings where you can just point your PHP configuration to their SMTP servers. SendGrid has a nice best practice collection on what to watch out for when sending emails in general.
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 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 created event registration web sites (you can imagine something like http://www.eventbrite.com/), which allow users to subscribe for event updates. When subscribed, we send mass emails (with the same content) to those users.
It was ok before, but recently I noticed that GMail always put the email into Spam folder.
As any texts would always go to Spam folder, I suspect that my domain was blacklisted by Gmail.
1) Is there a way to request google to put my domain into the whitelist?
2) Let's say it can't and I decide to register for new domain.
Is there a way to avoid the mass email to be marked as spam by Gmail? (may be something like what Facebook email notification do?)
Yes, don't send mass email :-) If you really want to avoid being considered a spammer, send out emails with less recipients, and don't swamp the mail server with them. Let's say, for example, you have thirty recipients for a given update. You can send out emails with one recipient every minute for a half hour.
Now the numbers may be different (and will of course depend on the success of your site) but the basic theory will stand up for quite a while.
As to how to get yourself whitelisted in GMail, that's really up to the recipient. They can usually do it by simply adding your email address to their contact list.
Keep in mind whitelisting there refers to individual GMail accounts, GMail itself does not whitelist IP addresses.
It does blacklist them if you misbehave but that generally means you get delivery rejects when trying to send. The fact that your messages are going in to the mail system and being delivered to spam folders indicates that this is an account-based thing, not a global GMail blacklisting of your IP/domain.
In any case, the place to report problems for GMail delivery problems is here.
As a school, we send out mass emails to our parents about events and issues. There's no way we have the time to spend sending out one email per minute. What we did was sign up with AOL as a business account, and we are allowed to do "bulk mailings" until they get multiple complaints. However, gmail clients usually have to list us as a valid sender or else those emails end up in spam folders. Works the same for clients using college alumni accounts from edu addresses. Gmail is the only one who regularly gives us this problem for our recipients on their email servers. We let parents know at orientation that they will have to specifically admit our emails via some setting on gmail.
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 a PHP web app that is going to send out about 1,000 emails. I would love to test the performance beforehand. Is there any kind of service that provides dummy email addresses to send to, for this kind of testing? I can't find anything that's not just a general bulk-email service. The key here is I just want dummy addresses to send to.
If you have the ability to just purchase a domain name from a hosting service, I know at least 1&1 gives you like 2500 email addresses per domain so you could literally spam yourself to death and not worry about any other 3rd party. You can pick up a domain name for like
When you say "test the performance", do you mean you want to know about your deliverability rates, or how your emails look?
Deliverability Rates
This is entirely dependent on your SMTP server and the reputation of the IP that it will be sending from along with your domain's SPF records and the content of your email. To maximize this, I would recommend using a marketing email service such as MailChimp or MadMimi.
Appearance of Emails
You could always just send yourself a test email to see how it looks. An alternative is to use a service like PostageApp that has a built in template designer that has both an easy email preview function and a test send email function.
(Full Disclosure: I am the Product Manager of PostageApp.)
If you use "Post Hoc" you can send email to an unlimited number of email addresses. Post Hoc acts like an SMTP server, and receives the email messages that you are sending, but it does not forward them on anywhere. You do not need to set up any email inboxes ahead of time, so there is no problem if you have 1000 different unique email addresses. They do not need to be from a single domain -- you can use any email address you want. It stores the email messages received so that you can inspect them if necessary. You would run it locally so that there is no concern about network problems, and it is very low overhead since it does almost no processing of the email. This way, the performance measure will be mostly the sending side processing. Best of all, it is open source and freely available:
Find it on GitHub: GitHub for Post Hoc
Also see the blog post: PostHoc: Testing Apps that Send Email