Solution May Take Patience
June 17, 2008 12:44 PM Subscribe
Our company has been using Gmail’s SMTP servers without issue for the last couple years for sending our ecommerce clients emails that read “A customer has placed an online order on your web site. To access it go to https://www.sometime.com/.” - Well, this week Gmail started blocking our outgoing messages as spam.
Every time we send one of these emails, or anything similar to it, we get the following response from Gmail:
This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification
We have started looking into other solutions like Send Blaster and
Secure SMTP - any thoughts on these services, or perhaps a better service?
Ideas? Suggestions? Anything useful that may help us? Thank you in advanced.
Every time we send one of these emails, or anything similar to it, we get the following response from Gmail:
This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification
Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:This has been an issue for a lot of people as of late. We don’t have time to hope Gmail fixes their false positives issue, and need another solution ASAP. We send roughly 200 to 250 emails a day, to one recipient per email. We need a solution that isn’t going to blacklist us as spam before the message even leaves (Gmail) and isn’t going to be hit as spam when it hits the client’s inbox.
clientsemailaddress@isp.com
Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: Message rejected. See http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=69585 for more information.
We have started looking into other solutions like Send Blaster and
Secure SMTP - any thoughts on these services, or perhaps a better service?
Ideas? Suggestions? Anything useful that may help us? Thank you in advanced.
Why are you sending these through gmail? You have absolutely no comeback because it's a free service.
Why not just use your own ISP's mail server? You shouldn't have any problem sending that kind of volume of mail, particularly if you talk to them about it first.
If that's not an option, why not set up your own mail server?
posted by standbythree at 1:02 PM on June 17, 2008 [1 favorite]
Why not just use your own ISP's mail server? You shouldn't have any problem sending that kind of volume of mail, particularly if you talk to them about it first.
If that's not an option, why not set up your own mail server?
posted by standbythree at 1:02 PM on June 17, 2008 [1 favorite]
We use fastmail.fm for the sending of emails and despite sending quite a few emails out & despite the form-like nature of those emails, we get no spam related bounces from fastmail and very few spam-bounces in total. There's a minor cost, but given the quantities of email you send out, it's negligible.
odinsdream: Don't want to criticise too much, but wanting to use an external SMTP provider isn't such a stretch. We don't use our ISP's SMTP server because it's been blacklised by some mail providers & we haven't set up our own SMTP server because (a) it's outside our technical comfort zone and (b) a lot of people blacklist SMTP servers that exist in cable/adsl/etc IP blocks.
posted by seanyboy at 1:26 PM on June 17, 2008
odinsdream: Don't want to criticise too much, but wanting to use an external SMTP provider isn't such a stretch. We don't use our ISP's SMTP server because it's been blacklised by some mail providers & we haven't set up our own SMTP server because (a) it's outside our technical comfort zone and (b) a lot of people blacklist SMTP servers that exist in cable/adsl/etc IP blocks.
posted by seanyboy at 1:26 PM on June 17, 2008
POBox.com and listbox.com offer various hosted email services. If these responses are important to your business, it's probably a good idea to have a contractual relationship to support it (and the listbox rates look like they are in the $15 - $30 / month range)
posted by jenkinsEar at 2:34 PM on June 17, 2008
posted by jenkinsEar at 2:34 PM on June 17, 2008
Setting and running up a full-blown mailserver is a huge PITA. But if it is just for outgoing mail, it's quite easy.
For example, on a linux distro with the 'yum' package manager you do:
Then make sure that reverse DNS works correctly. Usually this involves adding the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) to /etc/hosts.
Assuming your domain is: store.com and the server is: order1
Type:
...and you should see a fully qualified name.
Then you can watch mail going out on /var/log/exim/main.log to see if anything is rejected.
posted by kamelhoecker at 3:02 PM on June 17, 2008
For example, on a linux distro with the 'yum' package manager you do:
yum install eximThen make sure that reverse DNS works correctly. Usually this involves adding the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) to /etc/hosts.
Assuming your domain is: store.com and the server is: order1
127.0.0.1 order1.store.com order1
Type:
hostname -f...and you should see a fully qualified name.
Then you can watch mail going out on /var/log/exim/main.log to see if anything is rejected.
posted by kamelhoecker at 3:02 PM on June 17, 2008
odinsdream I think you're making an assumption of facts not in evidence.
While I my domains are hosted elsewhere, I use Google for Mail (great web interface and pretty damn good spam blocking). I'm assuming that the OP is doing something same. Last I checked the Google SMTP server required a login for use.
posted by bitdamaged at 4:50 PM on June 17, 2008
While I my domains are hosted elsewhere, I use Google for Mail (great web interface and pretty damn good spam blocking). I'm assuming that the OP is doing something same. Last I checked the Google SMTP server required a login for use.
posted by bitdamaged at 4:50 PM on June 17, 2008
I think the question is about an authorized GMail user -- maybe even a paid one -- having their messages rejected, which is definitely something Google should be fixing for its users.
posted by rokusan at 6:56 PM on June 17, 2008
posted by rokusan at 6:56 PM on June 17, 2008
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by bitdamaged at 12:59 PM on June 17, 2008