Email notification is down

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Andrew Lee
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Joined: Sat Feb 04, 2006 9:19 am
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Email notification is down

#1 Post by Andrew Lee »

Email notification is currently down and I am working to bring it up again. Might take one or two days, depending on how it goes.

Long story: When I migrated to the new server, I setup a Google Apps account to handle the emails for TPFC. I created a special "noreply" user for sending out emails on behalf of this board.

Reason: SMTP servers are notoriously troublesome to setup, secure and maintain. I was trying to offload some of the burden to Google. :D

Well I suspect a lot of users receive emails from the forum and mark them as spam conveniently instead of going through the route of unsubscribing. This is a widely-known problem. Personally, I have had countless legit e-newsletters moved to the spam box on my personal GMail account that I care to remember.

When Google finds a Google Apps account that is used to send out emails marked as spam by a sufficient number of users, it will ban the account. Case closed.

So now I need to install an SMTP server on the server, setup and secure it, and get emails moving again.

Apologies for the inconvenience!

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Midas
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Re: Email notification is down

#2 Post by Midas »

Andrew Lee wrote:So now I need to install an SMTP server on the server, setup and secure it, and get emails moving again.

Apologies for the inconvenience!
Just thinking that, after setting that up, you might want to pass outgoing email through some sort of re-director service (or at least an email alias) in case the same happens again -- in which case you just change it... I use e4ward.com, but YMMV.

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Andrew Lee
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Re: Email notification is down

#3 Post by Andrew Lee »

Just setup and configured Postfix, so email notification should be working now. I will continue to monitor the mail log, as I remember some destination SMTP servers can get picky about all sort of things and refuse to accept mails. :D

@Midas: Not sure how that would help. I needed an outgoing SMTP server that will develop email notifications for TPFC. How does a forwarding email address fit into this scenario?

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Midas
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Re: Email notification is down

#4 Post by Midas »

Andrew Lee wrote:@Midas: Not sure how that would help. I needed an outgoing SMTP server that will develop email notifications for TPFC. How does a forwarding email address fit into this scenario?
I have been wrong before, but I was thinking along the lines that if the address got banned again, it would only be the re-director/alias, not your own server... I'm just a user, not an admin, so forgive me if this sounds moronic. :oops:

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Andrew Lee
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Re: Email notification is down

#5 Post by Andrew Lee »

No worries at all. Basically, I was using Google's SMTP server for sending out emails on behalf of TPFC, but now I can't anymore (Well, actually I can create another user, but I am sure it will be banned in time to come for the same reason cited above).

So I need another SMTP server, and I have chosen to set one up myself using Postfix. Problem fixed!

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