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I need to send newsletters to our customers (nearly 500,000), We are using Google Apps as our mail providers, so ultimately it is Gmail.
I tried several ways of achieving this, but I've run into a couple of problems:
Sometimes, it is hanging up (not sending mails after 255). So I decided to split the emails up into blocks of 255 and tried it again, but this too hangs up once in a while. I can't rely on that.
Also, my clients say that my newsletters end up in their "spam" folder because Google's mail server has labeled them as spam mails.
What can I do to fix this problem?
It's called tarpitting and its designed to prevent people from sending big amounts of email.
Read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-spam_techniques_(e-mail)%20
Get your own email server to send it through. Follow all the rules to make this server believable, the content believable and then just MAYBE will you be able to reach all those people with your message. However if the message actually is spam someone will mark it as so and most people won't receive it anyway.
I would recommend using your own mail server on your own server rather than the gmail server.
But this won't prevent your emails being flagged as spam. It all depends on the recipient's email settings.
You will also have to edit your emails to ensure they do not contain spam related topics and methods because spam filters which check content will mark it as spam.
As you send your emails, you will have to monitor spam block lists to see if your server IP appears on them. If it does, you will have to contact them and apply for your server to be cleared from the block lists.
The good old days of send 10 Million emails is gone. Only the big companies can do it without being blocked.
you can use gmail smtp for max 90 users at a time else your gmail will be banned by google. So, to play safe you may send 50 emails per hour but that's taking forever for 500k emails list. I recommend you to use your own server which allowing you to send 500 emails per hour. Use phplist, they look like a professional autoresponder if you know how to mod and customize it like i did on my site http://phplistmod.com please take a look at it.
I don't think there is any way to sent 5000,000 mails at a time bc its like you are spamming all think or just want to sent newsletter as you say.
all mail providers are have a certain limit to sent mails at a time
you need special account with your email provider to access this kind or facility
as you mention above you are using gmail account to send mail
i think you need to to go with the third parties solutions for this.
Although this is an old thread, it is also visible. You can get more detailed help with improving deliverability to Gmail recipients here: https://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=81126&rd=1
I seem to have succeeded by making sure the rDNS record was correct and making some DNS changes including signing with DKIM (requires configuration of the mail server and DNS record).
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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.
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I'm trying to send an email with a Gmail Schema embedded. Currently, there is a restriction that says the schemas will only be visible if you apply to be whitelisted, but you can send emails from yourself to yourself to test.
I followed Google's scripts tutorial and was able to get myself an email. When I sent the exact same HTML email via mailgun, however, the Action does not become available in the inbox view.
Email sent via Google Scripts
vs
Email sent via Mailgun
According to Google's requirements, we require DKIM, but from the headers it looks as if Mailgun provides them. Mailgun clears out whitespace with =2Ds, but the Google Script doesn't.
Any ideas? I've got a pending application for getting whitelisted, but in the meanwhile I'd like to be able to develop and iterate.
Google actions will work if you send an email to yourself; but aside from that, they will not work until your pending application has been approved and activated.
Even then, in your application it's required that you specify the address and domain that will be sending the emails, and that you have the proper authentication. So even after you are approved, they will only work if you send from the domain and email address you requested approval for and as long as you still have the proper authentication measures in place.
Firstly, I AM NOT A SPAMMER :) I am a legitimate developer, working for a company who is currently developing an enewsletter sending system for our clients.
Now, we sent out a campaign for one of our clients to 80k solicited emails, and we got a huge amount blocked due to spam, even though our client has used ymlp.com to send similar campaigns to the same mailing list in the past with no problems.
I have stumbled across a few nuggets of information such as:
How to send 100,000 emails weekly?
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/04/so-youd-like-to-send-some-email-through-code.html
So I have got the SPF record setup, and I am in the process of sorting out DKIM records too.
But my question is this... How can ymlp.com and other newsletter sending systems such as campaign monitor and mail chimp get by all the spam blockage, without getting their users to setup these DNS records?
Our client who uses ymlp.com has no other SPF records setup other than the one I have created for our system.
I have noticed the word spammer being thrown around way too freely in topics such as this, so again I must reiterate, I am not looking to spam people, this is a genuine question for a genuine system in development.
Edit: - We seem to pass all SPF / DKIM / DomainKeys checks ( brandonchecketts.com/emailtest.php ), yet still get rejected for spam by a fairly hefty chunk. Our read rate on campaigns sent is about 2% at the mo, which is way below the 7-8% we expect
Have you checked out reverse DNS? It does help on the deliverability front. Also, be sure to monitor the reputation of your IPs.
Hope that helps!
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As per this question I asked previously on Google App Engine, if I have access to all the information in a standard email, not just the From, To, Subject, Body fields, but also all the headers and MIME information, how can I verify that two incoming emails with the same From address are actually from the same sender.
What I've considered thus far:
Check the IP address of the email's sending server
Check the DNS records of the email's sending server
Verify the sending agent of the email (i.e. web interface, Outlook, Thunderbird, etc)
Check the reply-to field
Etc.
I realize this is a complicated question (I'm sure companies like Posterous have spent tons of time on this problem). I'm just looking for a few criteria to get started preliminarily. Thanks!
Update:
The answers so far are really helping, but just to help them out, the context of my project is that I would be receiving tons and tons of email as a web app from my users. They would use their email as the primary way of inputting data into my system. This I why I made the Posterous analogy. The use case is very similar.
You're right that all of the headers together, and 'known good' email to compare to can help identify likely spoofed emails.
What you're developing would probably be at best a heuristic rather than an algorithm.
I'd consider weighting the fields by time-of-day and how close to 'known good' emails' time-of-day ...
Also, if the 'known good' emails are structured differently than the suspect; i.e. Inline images, html, shortened url's, etc.
Why not run the emails through spamassassin or some such filter that will attach a bayes score. You can then just read that score. It will save you reinventing the wheel.
You could bayes score the email against a database of all previous emails from the individual.
There is also looking up the Sender Permitted Framework and DomainKeys, which SpamAssassin can do for you.
Probably not practical but something that would work:
When an incoming mail arrives, have a "reply to sender" function and simply ask if they sent it. This could be in the form of a confirmation link that is automatically generated or something.
But since I don't know the specifics of the project this may not be practical... like if you had to do this multiple times for each user, no one would put up with it.
Just to compliment my brothers posting earlier:
Not knowing the context under which you want to analyse this, and being very general I would suggest your first port of call is SPF or DomainKeys in order to limit the possibility of email coming from a rogue source being accepted. I would also recommend using only one SMTP server with SSL security. I do this and travelling worldwide I have rarely been in a situation I couldn't send mail and in those cases the only thing that did work was webmail (no safe local SMTP).
Additionally to that: if you are verifying mail is really coming from yourself then you could also use PGP tools to sign your mail upon sending and then filter any mail that didn't have a valid signature. Enigmail in Thunderbird is a good source of automatic signing and there are plugins for Outlook as well.
After that if you really want to do a more forensic job on an email then you could use a Spam Bayes to score the email against a database of previous emails. You would build up a database of tokens around the non-unique data (excluding entries such as "To:") and then score the email for the probability that it is like the previous emails. In theory you should score very highly for any mail.
Obviously I don't know your situation, but I think that there are many techniques but sometimes it is easier to go to the root of the issue than try and fix it down the line.
Update
Based on the context supplied:
I would consider using "Address Extensions" this is where your user can send mail to an address which contains a reference using the email address: emailname+extension#domain.com
GMail and many other servers support delivery of email with a +extension# through to the correct emailname#domain.com without hi-jinx. You could get the user to deliver mail with a unique ID as the extension and that way you would know it had come from them and they would feel more special. Obviously someone could steal their unique code by sniffing their outgoing or your incoming mail but that is always possible and if someone can do that they can probably inject mail as well.
If you really just want to go down the analysis route then I would suggest just using the reverse of a SpamAssassin per-user Bayes match. Where you compare every mail to a database of mails from a sender (instead of the traditional matching of mails 'to' an account). Remembering that once your database is polluted with a false positive you will have to remove the false positive or risk the integrity of the matching for that sender.
Maybe look into using Sender Policy Framework. It might not be exactly what you are looking for but it might help.
Briefly, the design intent of the SPF record is to allow a receiving MTA (Message Transfer Agent) to interrogate the Name Server of the domain which appears in the email (the sender) and determine if the originating IP of the mail (the source) is authorized to send mail for the sender's domain.
Ripped from wikipedia:
Sender Policy Framework (SPF), as
defined in RFC 4408, is an e-mail
validation system designed to prevent
e-mail spam by addressing a common
vulnerability, source address
spoofing. SPF allows e-mail
administrators the ability to specify
which Internet hosts are allowed to
send e-mail claiming to originate from
that domain by creating a specific DNS
SPF record in the public DNS record.
Mail exchangers then use the DNS
record to verify the sender's identity
against the list published by the
e-mail administrator.
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I have my domain's email set up with Google Apps, and I am interested in sending automated emails (when users register, for example) with the From and/or Reply-To field being "no-reply#example.com". I have a few questions pertaining to how this is done:
Should I actually set up a user in Google Apps named "no-reply"?
If not setting up a "no-reply" user, should I log in with a real address (e.g.: "support#example.com") and send the email as being from "no-reply#example.com" instead? Or should I simply use the Reply-To email header?
If it's necessary to use the Reply-To header, is there a way to block the true From address (i.e.: the username I used to log into Google's SMTP server)?
Yes, you should setup a separate noreply address on your email server.
There are excellent reasons why you should set up a no-reply email address.
Why is it important to have a no-reply on bulk emails?
Many of the recipients of the email will try to hit 'reply' and they will have a multitude of reasons for doing so. Often, it is not sensible to have all of these going to a single representative at your company. Furthermore, many emails from bulk lists will be bounced back. You don't want to have to sift through these in order to find legitimate questions from your mail outs.
The best way to respond to questions rather than replying to bulk emails, is to have the recipients direct their questions to appropriate response emails either through their usual contact or via your company website.
What if recipients DO hit the reply button?
The email originator for the bulks should not just silently swallow the replies. Many companies do this and as a result, legitimate replies are ignored without any indication to your client or potential client and they, feeling neglected, go elsewhere for business.
The originating email account should be set up with an auto-responder explaining that the email was not processed and suggest alternative ways of contacting your company.
In gmail this can be done by setting up a Vacation responder with no last day. You can find the Vacation responder feature under the General tab of the account settings.
Avoid having extra accounts by setting up no-reply as a group that restricts users from outside your domain sending to it.
Unless you can think of a really good reason for it, I would suggest that you send your emails from support# rather than no-reply#.
The whole reason for a support# email address is to receive comments and feedback from your userbase, and if you're sending them emails why bother making it hard for them? If they can just reply to the email you'll receive way more feedback that way.
I suggest you set up a "Nickname" alias ( Manage Domain > Users > edit user > Add Nickname ). Then create a filter that sends any reply to that nickname straight to trash or spam.
Just set up a "no-reply" account. It won't hurt anything, people will still try to send stuff to it, and it will serve your purpose.
As for the latter two questions, it depends.
If you're sending these e-mails as a part of an automated script (i.e. forum registration) just use the "no-reply" accounts credentials. Log in periodically to make sure you aren't getting legit delivery errors (as opposed to the jokers that use fake e-mail addresses) or other odd behaviour.
If you're not sending these e-mails as a part of an automated script, it depends. If you also manage a support address (support#example.com, staff#example.com, etc.) you may want to send on behalf of, and use the reply-to. But this part is a little more subjective, and really depends on your setup.
I don't know if this will help or not, but IIRC, with gmail you can do something like
name+something_else_here#domain.com
Then, set up a filter so that emails with that "something_else_here" part go past the inbox to a label.
Does that help?
I think creating a user named no-reply is a bad approach. An alias or a restricted group is a much neater and functional solution IMHO. Also, google apps cost is based on user number.
A cool way to handle this would be using the vacation setting in GMail to send an automated response back on the no-reply email address. The vacation reminder would then remind users that this is an unmonitored email address.
I think the right thing to do is setup a filter that sorts your mailer-daemon messages into a special folder (Or trash if you so desire.) Or, like other comment have suggested, use a separate mail address.
noreply is good to indicate to people that this isn't an address you check, but it's not really the solution to dealing with bounce mail. In fact it's more likely your mail will end up in spam filters because your attempt at sender obfuscation will just look like spam to the receiving host.
You should create a noreply user. But use it as a spam mail (when registering unknown sites) and a mail for testing.