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.
Related
Closed. This question needs to be more focused. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by editing this post.
Closed 4 years ago.
Improve this question
In Cuba, web access is extremely censored, so I created a tool that allows more than 50,000 people to browse the Internet through email. Cubans send me an email with an URL in the subject line, and I email them back with the response. Read more at https://apretaste.com.
It was working like a charm, till the communist government of Cuba started blocking my emails. My solution was rotation.
I started with Amazon SES, and I was changing the domain each time it was blocked, but Amazon adds a header to all emails, and once they blocked the header no email from SES was able to reach Cuba any more. The same happened with Mailgun and others, they all add headers.
Currently I am creating Gmail accounts and sending via SMTP, but Google blocks me for no reason and only allows to send 100 emails a day per account. Also I can only create few emails using the same IP address/phone, so I was forced to use anonymous proxies and fake Chinese phones. Now I am fighting a war on two fronts.
An email can be blocked by three parameters: IP address, domain, and email address.
It will be terrific if I can set up my own Postfix server at a VPS that auto-rotates the IP address. Even better if I can simulate "gmail.com", to avoid purchasing a new domain every day.
All the intents to create what I call "the ultimate sender" just either reach the spam folder or add unwanted headers making it too easy to block. I feel exhausted. I hit a knowledge barrier here.
I know I am crossing to the dark side, but this is for a very good cause. Thousands count on this service as their only source of unbiased news, social network and to feel part of the 21st century.
Can you please help me implementing "the ultimate sender", or pointing to another solution that I may be missing?
I have a few suggestions for you.
The first one relies on The Onion Router also known as Tor.
Since you are crossing to the dark side, why not also take a look into the darknet?
Take a look at this list of Tor email providers. If you have your own email server that can be accessed through Tor, it becomes much harder for anybody to stop people from using this service. After all, Tor was developed to offer people uncensored access to the web.
You can read about Tor in detail here, it uses Onion Routing and this is how you would set up your server to use Tor.
Here is an example how you could use it:
The steps that involve the setup, receiving an URL request and sending back the reply are as follows:
Set up an email server.
Configure your email server to use Tor.
Publish the public service name. (e.g. "duskgytldkxiuqc6.onion")
Deploy a client that takes the service name and a URL, and let it send an email with a request to your server.
The client now waits for a reply.
You send a reply and the client receives it.
You can change your service name on a regular basis, but you need to make it accessible to those who will use this service.
Having an own email server means being able to control the email header.
Here is one example how you could make use of it:
Configure your email server so that it receives and recognizes
emails which contain the requested URLs.
Before you send a reply modify the email header so that it shows a random IP address and a random sender email address including a random domain name.
Send your reply.
Sending an email that way means that you cannot be replied back to. But since your reply already contains the requested information there is no need to.
I hope this helps.
Crowd source it.
Find a way that volunteers can send some emails for you. This is the only long term approach that I can think of. A simple web interface with mail to links would be be enough to get started although there are other potential problems with this approach too.
Because you are talking about low numbers of users, you could also use crowdsourcing to create the single email address per person approach. They can create an account on a specific set of email providers and give you the credentials. This would allow the single email per user approach or could be used to rotate through a large set of email accounts to send emails.
The simplest solution is perhaps to set up a local SMTP server on your own computer. You don't even need a server per se.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/winsmtpserver/
There are many other such applications. They are usually used to test SMTP functions during local development, but there is nothing against actually sending spam through them.
I know this would be quite a large task, but how about pairing the users with one or just a few emails so they always receive an email from that email.
I'd assume people wouldn't have more than 100 queries per day, if so they could start receiving them from a backup email
I'd imagine it would look less suspicious for them to appear to be in constant contact with one unique email rather than 50,000 being in contact with one
I know this would be a huge undertaking, but I feel like it solves your issue.
Since the users are willing to receive emails form you then your shouldn't be blocked.
When you mentioned you are getting block does it mean your mail is going in spam or is getting lost in between sending and receiving or it is getting bounced back??
My suggestion would be to setup your own mail server and follow as below:
-Get approx 25 or more ip to rotate. (IP is the most imp part which is tracked and is accountable for the reputation of your mail server)
Don't start sending emails in bulk from the word go it is better to gradullay increase the email volume so that mail server reputation nicely built
keep changing the format of the email often
encourage user to add yourself to there contact list
your best part is user are willing to receive emails from you and you would reply to revived email is the USP of yours but still i will recommend you to register for FBL so that you would know which user is reporting you as spam and you can remove him from your list and never send him email again.
using best practice to send emails like dkim, SPF, dmarc are also vital.
Hope my answer was of some help to you. If you need step by step guide to step up mail server let me know.
My friend, do you remember what made Hillary Clinton lose the last elections to Trump?
It was the "mail" affair. And what was it? People discovered she shared confidential information through a non-official, non-governmental email account (i.e., she used some Gmail, Yahoo or another of a kind). Until here, nothing new with direct relation to your matters. But there is an small particularity on this history, and this can put, maybe not a solution, but maybe a light on a new path you could follow: Clinton actually never sent those emails; the email account she used had the password shared and the communication between people (Clinton-someone) occurred only using the drafts of the account.
How? One side logs in and accesses the drafts folder. There he/she reads the last message and edits it, cutting and writing new data - then save the draft message. On the next turn, the other side of the communication line logs in and do the same. And so forth, so never really sending those messages, but instead just updating the drafts (this "Hillary" method does schooled people... Dilma Rousseff, impeached ex-president of Brazil, actually did this method down there in Brazil too).
So, maybe if you could establish a pact with your user that he/she doesn't delete the account's password, you could pass those information by this method - without "really" exchanging emails. Maybe a "parent" email account (some that could reset a lost password) could be useful too.
Alternative: aren't you able to contract a regular HTTP webserver? You could rely on FTP to publish data to your user, he/she asks for it and you publish a page with that content.
Salvi, have you tried something with Telnet? OK, we are talking here about a text-only environment, but if nothing more would rest in the future, this could be better than nothing. Maybe you could implement a podcast-like, or push-like service based on it. Look what people do with it with references to your walk on the dark side...
If in Windows, open your command prompt.
Type telnet and press Enter.
Type "o" without quotes and press Enter.
Type "towel.blinkenlights.nl" without the quotes and press Enter.
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)
I am trying to build a mail server using Ubuntu to send mail
I have done some research on that and find it is nearly impossible for a individual to send
the mail e.g. hotmail , gmail.
The question i am asking is not how to build a own server, it is why i can not build my own server.
To be precise:
Questions:
1) what are the requirements to send to those e.g. hotmail ,gmail server ? e.g. mx record , clear dns record . (only from server aspect , not concerning other factors such as headers or mail content), It would be easier to understand if they are listed out.
2) I read some document and it said the problem can be overcome by relayhost, what is it about and is it feasible?
3) For those ISP , what are their procedure in building the mail server? How is it different from my own small Ubuntu one?
Sorry for asking a lot of question, any help would be nice and well appreciated .
Most people use an out-of-the-box package as a mail server, rather than trying to write one that follows all of the relevant RFC specifications for SMTP, Internet Message Format, IMAP4, POP3, etc.
I'm not saying "don't write your own", just that if you do, be prepared for months and months of hard work, lots of bugs and even more frustration. It's a big project.
In terms of sending messages, you will need to follow the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) to send messages; and they should be sent to the correct server, as per the recipient's DNS records - see RFC 1034 and RFC 1035.
If you are correctly using SMTP to send valid messages to the right server, there's not a lot else you can do.
Your next problem is going to be reputation. This would be the same, whichever software you use to send your messages.
It's easy for a spammer to set up a new mail server and start sending messages, so it will take a while for some mail servers to trust you (particularly those that are regularly targeted, such as Hotmail, Gmail, etc).
Instead of sending messages directly to the recipient's server, you can use SMTP to send the messages to a relay server. This would usually be your own ISP's server, but it can be any willing partner. You would normally need to make advance arrangements, so that they will permit you to relay messages.
The relay server would then attempt to send the message to the recipient server. If it cannot do so, it must report the failure to the sender.
I'm sending newsletter using Zend Mail. I have used setReturnPath() to put all undelivered mail notifications in one place.
And what now?
How to get the list of addresses which were unreachable?
How do I read and parse the returned notifications?
How to know whether the mail returned because of non existing email or just quota exceeded?
Which headers do I need to send and check?
Related:
Variable Envelope Return Pathwiki
Handling undelivered emails in web appso
This class may be helpful. Can determine whether the mail is a bounce and return a response code with description:
http://www.phpclasses.org/package/2691-PHP-Parse-bounced-e-mail-message-reports.html
Short Answer:
you can't do that in a simple way and not in your app.
Long Answer:
You should handle that in asynchronous way and outside your php app (at least in part). First of all you must setup the return address to something like sender+recipient=recipientdomain.com#senderdomain.com as in the TimB answer. At this point all the notification sent by receiving smtp server will go to that address.
Then you need to setup the smtp daemon at senderdomain.com mail exchanger to handle that kind of bounce messages and process them in some sort of pipe.
With a pipe you can forward the returned message to an external program which parse the message and extract the needed informations (i.e. the reason why the delivery is failed)
At that point in your program (which can be a cli script in your application) you can mark the address as failing and optionally can record why.
This is a pretty difficult task, which can't be handled in a simple application. Usually I use a dedicated software for large mailing list handling such as sympa which takes care of this task for you.
Otherwise you can use an external delivery service such as Sendgrid which will do the dirty job for you and report the failing addresses with a simple API. As a bonus with this solution, they are in the whitelists for all the major providers, so your email won't be marked as spam as far as you respect some simple rules (i.e. removing bouncing addresses and use an opt-in policy for your newsletter)
Well, the second link and especially the answer by TimB explains very well the procedure.
What may not be clear is that the return path is nothing other than a regular email account, i.e. you will get the email to that address. Zend_Mail is not waiting for a response and hence there is no list of addresses.
What kind of practical issues are there concerning sending tons of e-mail from a server? Will the likelihood of that e-mail being received be just the same as if it had been sent from g-mail or a personal e-mail account if I for example just blindly call the mail() function in PHP tens of thousands of times a day?
(note: you are not helping a spammer here, this relates to a notify feature I'm thinking about for a future link sharing site)
While you may technically be able to send thousands of mails per minute, in reality you must be carefull.
Say you send out 500 emails to yahoo for example. if enough people mark your message as spam, soon, ANY email you send to yahoo will be marked as spam, or [BULK]. Many isp's routinely tar-pit or outright reject email from servers on lists such as RBL (the real-time black hole list). If your mail IP gets put on one of these lists, you can kiss sending email normally from that ip ever again goodbye. Users are very finicky and it doesn't take many complaints to get your mail ip blocked at many domains.
Also since you are sending automated messages, there are heuristics used to determine if the same message is being sent to many users on the same domain. This also increases the chance your mail will be marked as spam.
This is why clean emails from some addresses always go into the spam box. Their company may have not been careful enough when sending what could be perceived as spam. Proceed with caution.
http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/AvoidingFpsForSenders
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/842851
http://www.blacklistedip.com/rbl_list.php
It helps to set a 'x-mailer' and ('X-MimeOLE' if your pretending to be outlook) of a real mail client.
It also helps to send it from a server that is a mail server for the domain in the from address, with forward & reverse DNS records setup.
No issues. Once a server is correctly configured as a mail server (SMTP) for a particular domain, there is no difference if the mail it sends out came to it from Outlook, or from the mail() function in PHP - both are getting the SMTP server to do all the heavy lifting
I always make sure to set my X-Mailer headers correctly (identifying that the message was sent from within PHP) to ensure that any overzealous anti-spam services recognize it as an automatated notification as opposed to bulk/junk email. e.g.
$headers .= "X-Mailer: PHP/".phpversion();
All the configuration and limits you'll encounter are with the SMTP server, not from PHP. You can configure SMTP to rate-limit to 2 messages per second for example, this means if you queue up 1,200 messages they'll be drip fed out over the next hour rather than all at once (two is a really low number, 5-25 is more realistic).
SMTP is the backbone of email and some SMTP servers can happily handle tens of thousands of messages per minute (or more!) - the only limitation you'll likely face is bandwdith ;)
Check with your hosting provider, especially if you're on shared hosting. For example: GoDaddy limits shared hosting accounts to sending 1000 emails per day on their server (http://support.godaddy.com/groups/web-hosting/forum/topic/e-mail-sending-limit/). I'm sure other providers have their own limits (I believe the provider one of the companies I worked for used limited outgoing emails to 250 per minute or something along those lines).
Edit: In my case the solution was to contact our hosting provider. They provided info to route outgoing emails through a server they had dedicated to sending outgoing emails. Solved the problem right away.