Email sending approaches [closed] - email

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In my project have to suggest email sending approaches to my manager. As a part of design document.
Following are the approaches available. Kindly share your views on pros and cons for these approaches
Approach 1: Use third party SMTP
Pros: Readily available
Cons: Costs
Approach 2: Host own SMTP on Windows Azure
Pros: ?
Cons: ?
Approach 3: Using Public email Account
Pros: No additional cost or dependency.
Cons: Requires more effort in terms of designing and implementation.

Approach 2 is not recommended by Microsoft, and I am also with that. The main reason is that the chance for IP Address of Azure datacenter to become blacklisted because of SPAM is very high.
Don't quite understand Approach 3.
The highly recommended approach (also by Microsoft) is to use a third party mail sending system, such as SendGrid. Microsoft & SendGrid are partnering to offer Azure developers free and easy way to reliably, securely and easily send e-mail message from the Windows Azure platform. Read more on the link provided. And this is the official reccomendation.

Does not matter what SMTP server you use because all your code needs to know is about the SMTP host, port, secure mode authentication and user credentials. And ofcourse your application should be able to connect to the SMTP host. If your application supports connecting to any SMTP, then no need to bother about what to use. You can very well use your own company's SMTP server or use public SMTP severs like Gmail, yahoo etc.

We use Amazon's SES service to send emails from AzureWatch to our customers. Currently sending north of 3000-4000 emails per day. Works wonderfully and is very affordable.

There is also option to queue emails before sending them using services like SendGrid or AWS SES. You should consider this option if your solution is dealing with high loads or if you do not like the fact that third-party smtp service is out of the Azure and out of your (direct) control.
Take a look at:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2010/10/08/adoption-program-insights-sending-emails-from-windows-azure-part-1-of-2.aspx
http://www.AzureMailer.com (commercial solution)

third party is the recommended way to do this, take a look at:
http://blog.smarx.com/posts/emailtheinternet-com-sending-and-receiving-email-in-windows-azure

Related

Send-only Email Server

I have a domain registered and AWS EC2 with LAMP used as a online game server.
Now I wish to set-up a e-mail server on it. But after some research, I found it to be some kind complicated.
The e-mail server will only be used to send forgot-password emails to players. So I am seeking a simple way to set-up a send-mail server without mailbox or any other functions that will compliate the things. Is there any way to do that?
I definitely advise you to use Amazon SES. You will use Amazon's infrastructure to send emails as a service.
To me, it seems to be the best solution to your use case. You won't pay much, won't need to worry about downtime or scalability, and will simply need to use their SDK in whichever language you prefer.
Take a look at the pricing, it is quite attractive.

Is there a better front-end than Phplist to integrate with Sendgrid?

I'm currently integrating Sendgrid (Back-end API) with Phplist (front-end). However, I realised that there are many features that Phplist doesn't support such as autoresponders, different management levels (sub/superusers) and is unable to send high volumes. May I know if there is a better front end that I can use to integrate it with sendgrid?
Yes! OpenEMM seems to have the features you're looking for. You can see the full list here, but the highlights are:
Configuration of different users with different rights/roles
Autoresponder mails and error messages (bounce management)
It looks a little tricky to setup, but they have good documentation. Also, the code is hosted on SourceForge and the reviews look solid too.
In terms of setting it up with SendGrid, you have to configure your sendmail to use our SMTP servers. Luckily, we have a tutorial already that shows you exactly how to do that:
http://docs.sendgrid.com/documentation/get-started/integrate/examples/sendmail/

Does Windows Phone 7.1 support SSL sockets?

I can't find a definitive answer on this, but a the moment I'm guessing not. If not, is there any possible workaround other than proxying via a server?
By way of interest, I'm just trying to connect to Gmail imap for a small test application...
No, WP7.1 does not support SSL sockets.
Edit
Typically you would use SslStream to implement SSL over TCP. Unfortunately, SslStream is not available in Silverlight or WP7. You have to roll your own (which is a bad idea, but possible), or use a third party library.
As mentioned by Eugene, there's SecureBlackbox, but that's more than a thousand dollars (minimum, depending on your many license choices) to use in a commercial product. If you're doing this on your own, that's probably too big an upfront cost. If you're doing this for your company, it might be a route to consider.
Another option might be to try to use BouncyCastle in WP7, however BouncyCastle doesn't currently release WP7 compatible binaries and may rely on framework items not available in WP7. This blog entry implies it might be possible, but will require some tweaking.
If you're a solo dev, I'd recommend at least trying BouncyCastle before considering SecureBlackbox. If you're doing your company's WP7 app offering, start with SecureBlackbox.
Our SecureBlackbox offers SSL support: you can use SSL engine with any transport (including sockets and pigeon mail) or you can use socket-based client component. There's a WP7-specific problem with certificate validation though - as WP7 doesn't let us access system certificates, you would need to have trusted certificates list in your application. Not a big problem with our components (SecureBlackbox includes complete certificate management as well), but you need to be aware about this extra step.
As far as I know, IPWorks by /n Software is offered for Windows Phone Mango, but I don't know exactly what they offer in SSL aspect.
I did get Bouncy Castle compiling for CF 3.5 - it's probably not a stretch to use that work for Windows Phone.
Internally we've been using an internal port of OpenSSL for Compact Framework apps for ages, and it wasn't a difficult port. I suspect getting that working under Phone also wouldn't be overly difficult.

running my own jabber/xmpp server [closed]

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Can I make my own jabber server.So
that if I run my website xyz then
people should be be able to get
their jabber id from my website by
registering on my website.
Is there any open source
implementation of jabber server that
I can use?
I use Openfire to run my Jabber server and am quite happy with it. Probably higher-overhead than some of the other options (jabberd, ejabberd, etc.), but it's easy to install and has a great web-based admin UI.
As far as adding users via a web application - I don't know how you would go about doing that with Openfire, but it should be possible. It can plug in to many databases, and you might be able to give your web application an admin account that it can use to create users.
Alternatively, the Jabber/XMPP protocol supports creating a new account when you first connect to a server, if that's good enough for you. OpenFire supports that feature (as do most Jabber servers, I believe).
Update: The User Service Plugin for Openfire exposes an HTTP API for performing user administration actions. That's probably exactly what you need.
Can i make my own jabber server.So
that if i run my website xyz then
people should be be able to get theri
jabber id from my website by
registering on my website.
It depends on what kind of hosting you have. I think you should at least have VPS hosting to install the software. Basic hosting for a couple of bucks does not allow you to run jabber server.
Is there any open source implementation of jabber server that i can use?
I myself really like lua's prosody. It is easy to install / configure
You might like ejabberd, it is fairly friendly to new users:
http://www.process-one.net/en/ejabberd/
For you first question:
You might want to look at the XEP-0077 extension for in-band registration.
http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0077.html#intro
What language are you coding in? You might want to check and see if that language has a XMPP library that can handle this extension.
I've tried most of them and can agree on ejabberd. The only problem is that in order to change it, you need to program in Erlang. Openfire looks great, but I could not get the certificate to load properly: there is a bug with the implementation, so TLS will not work. I couldn't get Soapbox to access a local MySQL database, so that was out too.
As for client-side, you can use Miranda.

Simple GWT hosting [closed]

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I have designed a website with the GWT, This is purely a static site and it doesnt have any servlet or any rpc part involved in it. Its just a plain static pages in GWT .I have compiled with the GWT and there are all related html ,.js files are present in the public folder. Now i want to host the same in any of the web host.
Good web host to host this web site.
Procedure to upload the GWT compiler output files into the web host.
Note:- I tried with the google app engine but it had issues as i have couple of video files that needs to be uploaded which is embedded in the webpage.
Thank you
I think this is not really a "GWT hosting" problem, but rather a "hosting" problem. Finding a good host is not that problematic though. I suggest you to look up webhosting in your own language and country, which makes it easier to contact the hosting company in case of problems.
I don't suggest a free hosting, unless you really can't afford a payed host. Your site being static, would require a cheap host. Free hosts have always got some problems and some advertising attached to your content in some way (frames and popups).
For the uploading part, you usually get a (s)ftp account which you can use to upload your files to the server with a (s)ftp client. Good companies provide detailed description of this process for their server, and as being a paying customer, you will usually get technical support as well.
It's good to know that a host alone doesn't include a domain. To have a yourcompany.com address, you need to register it, and you will have to pay a (low) registration fee. Some compaines offer the domain as part of the hosting service.
I host a few small GWT (client-only) apps on the same site I host my blog. There's no problem. In the end GWT is just javascript with a couple of html files, and thats all thats really being hosted.
Ummmmm...why not host it on Google App Engine?
It's free and deployment is easy if you're using Eclipse.