I'm usign amazon cloud services to host my webpage. Our web site, actually sends a lot of emails per hour. In one instant our server could be asked to send 30 mails or more.
Sometimes our clients complaint about not getting emails from the web, which is connected to our mail server to send emails. This doesn't happen if we send the email directly from our addresses to theirs, so I'm pretty much know is the web page who's causing the problem.
The thing is I don't know what is happening and neither know what to look for. I've checked memory and cpu of that server and everything seems to work fine
make sure your website sends the messages with a correct bounce address (aka envelope sender address). this does not have to be the same thing as the address in the From: header. by default, this is often something like "apache#www.example.com" - I don't know about amazon). these types of bounce addresses are bad because usually you don't receive the error message if something goes wrong. use a real email account. To check what bounce address you currently use, look at the message source of a received mail and see the Return-Path header.
check the logs of your mailserver for those missing messages. either it reports an error (in which case you should get the error to your bounce address) or it reports the message as sent to the target server (in which case you tell your clients to check THEIR maillogs since you can prove you have sent the message)
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I am sending email from application. My problem is when your type email address means format is correct but it may be not available anywhere.so when I am trying send such email address using SMTP through application, so how to track fail-over notification if intended recipient not found.
please suggest any approach.
There is no standard way of doing this. You might be able to make it work in some cases by parsing incoming email looking for delivery failure notices but it'll be a lot of work to keep that parsing code up to date. So at best you'll only get some of the notices. If you get a notice at all. The recipient's SMTP server may not send you anything, or the notice might get lost on it's way back to you.
The only way you are reliably get this sort of information is to host the SMTP server yourself, and deliver directly to the recipients SMTP server. In that case the SMTP server knows the status of the email's delivery and could report that to your email client via some non-standard back channel.
Note: Hosting your own SMTP server is non-trivial. And you will probably need to be on a fixed IP otherwise external SMTP servers will treat your email as spam. In case you're thinking of running one over a home connection or something.
Mandrill has inbound email processing, in which you can setup a catch-all address for which incoming e-mail will be posted to a specified URL.
For example, e-mails to *#sub.domain.com could get posted to http://mydomain.com/process.
Is there a service that will work this way but that allows to "re-route" the e-mails? Say if a post to the URL above returns a specific code, say 403, the e-mail will be swallowed, but when a 200 code is returned, the e-mail gets sent to a specific address, without modification, just as if it was originally sent to that address.
I guess I could code a script that would just re-send the e-mail, but I don't want to run into deliverability issues.
I'm not sure I'm explaining this clearly, so here's a specific example:
E-mail to newsletters#sub.domain.com is received by a Mandrill-like service (the receiver)
That service posts the e-mail to http://mydomain.com/process (let's call this the processor)
The processor either:
Returns a 403, in which case nothing else happens
Returns a 200, and a destination address, and then the receiver delivers that e-mail to the new destination
EDIT: I realize I could just use Mandrill to re-send the e-mail, but wouldn't I run into problems given I won't be the original sender? For example, if I receive an e-mail from support#microsoft.com and then I re-send that e-mail to another address, could I be flagged as a spammer or have other issues with deliverability? So this might not be possible at all?
It seems it is indeed impossible to do what I want, otherwise anybody could spam the world with no problems, however, Mandrill just added this feature, which might come in handy:
http://help.mandrill.com/entries/23374656-Can-I-send-emails-on-behalf-of-my-clients-
This is just an experiment, but I'm going to try and resend mails to my own server instead of forwarding to the original receiver, so then an e-mail client can pull the messages from there.
I am working on a research project that has to do with responding to spam. I want to implement the following functionality:
1. A mail server that saves all incoming email messages in an easily accessable form - hard drive, database, etc. For example, if someone sends a message to peter#domain.com or akjfhasfkjf#domain.com, this message should be accepted and saved.
2. I should be able to reply to these messages from the same server/account. E.g. a message gets delivered to peter#domain.com, so the spammer receives a response from the same address.
Any suggestions on any software / packages that can help me with that? If I can interface with them with Java or Python, it would be even better.
Thanks.
you could run a postfix mailserver with fuglu,a python framework for mail filters. it would be very simple to write a plugin that does what you want.
but remember: responding to spam is in most cases a bad idea. the sender address is almost always forged, so the reply goes some innocent victim instead of the spammers inbox and your server could be blacklisted for backscattering.
I'm designing a capability to send emails out for my app.
I was wondering once I send out an email, is there anyway to find out whether
the email address exists and is real
the email was received
if not received, what the problem was? (mailbox full, email
address
invalid etc.)
the email was read (probably asking too much
but
would be good)
Do I get any feedback at all?
I'm using the SMTPClient in the .NET framework to do this.
no. You can find out if the target server accepts the address. but you can not find out if the account really exists. even if the server accepts the address it could be bounced later.
no. if you don't get a bounce, you have to assume it was delivered. there is no guarantee. it could have landed in a spam box etc.
if a mail is not received you either get a bounce message (or depending on how you send the message you get the error directly in the smtp transaction while sending it to the target server).
no. you can request a read-receipt or do fancy stuff like embedding links to external tracker images. but all this stuff is usually blocked by default.
On our website which is asp.net, we make a sale and an automated email is sent out to the client with an attached PDF invoice we create using a 3rd party app. We are having trouble getting these delivered successfully to some corporate clients. Yet we also send a copy of that same email to ourselves which we receive fine. We can then forward this on to the client and they do receive it no problems. So the original is not received but the forwarded mail is.
The webserver is a seperate IP address to our office Exchange server which sends the forwarded mail.
I have tried to find the difference between the 2 mails and it looked like a rich text issue, except that the mail is plain text or html!
The question is a little vague i know as i do not know where to look for the best. It seems to make no differenec which mail program is used, we tried MailEable and it was the same thing.
Mail is logged on the web server as leaving and that is the last we see of it. It doesnt bounce but it is definatley delivered to the client server, but doesnt reach the recipient. We used to track thru Message Labs and it would say it had reached the destination server ok. We do not use ML anymore until we find the issue, keeping it simple.
We have no issues sending to AOL, Hotmail and Yahoo etc.
It appears something in the email is upsetting server based spam software.
We havnt been able to get hold of any email logs from clients.
any suggestions?
Check out this link mentioning a reason not related to size issues
The SMTP (internet mail protocol) RFC (An RFC is a document describing
the standards that make the Internet work.) explicitly states that the
length of a single unterminated line can be 1000 bytes, no larger.
Some SMTP servers violate this, and the Firebox (this is our firewall)
will drop the connection when the line length exceeds the configured
length, which defaults to 1000.
which might indicate your pdf generator and/or mail generator creates output that's not 100% standards compliant. Might be a good point to check as it could explain why certain customer suffer fom this problem only.
552 Requested mail action aborted: exceeded storage allocation
This means there was a violation at the client's ("customer's") mail server. The message exceeded a threshold/limit of some kind. It's not clear if this is a per-message limit or if the user's mailbox is just so full that it cannot accept another message.
Either way, this is mostly out of your control. Only thing you can do it try to keep your e-mail messages and attachments as small as possible. If you can, compress (zip) any attachments before sending.