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I am new to the field and I am trying to learn.
I have a domain name (let's say mydomain.it) registered with Company A.

Company A provides me both a DNS service and a Mail service.
I use the DNS to redirect web requests to my only Virtual Machine handling the web requests.
I use the Mail service for the web interface to manually send e-mails to my customers.

Of course I also want to send automatic e-mails.
To do so I have setup a sendmail SMTP server on my virtual machine and I am sending the e-mails directly from there.

The problem is that the automatic emails are either:

  • Marked as spam
  • Or not delivered at all

What should I do?

  1. Keep the same infrastructure but improve the sendmail configuration to be authenticated (is it possible? how? according to some answer seems difficult and includes building a reputation for the IP/Server => Prevent mail being marked as spam).
  2. Use the SMTP server of company A instead of using sendmail?
  3. Other?

Thank you

Community
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mottalrd
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  • The linked question is also quite similar, this is just on a broader level (http://serverfault.com/questions/227242/prevent-mail-being-marked-as-spam) – mottalrd Mar 09 '14 at 13:29
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    I agree with EEAA, but if you do decide to host your own email server anyway, search for techniques to improve email deliverability. [Such as in this thread](http://serverfault.com/q/12423/118258), or the one you linked. – HopelessN00b Mar 09 '14 at 14:03
  • thanks, I will study more deeply the deliverability topic before ever thinking jumping in. I did not expected such a big iceberg under the e-mail delivery topic! – mottalrd Mar 09 '14 at 16:08

1 Answers1

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First - email is a PITA to manage. You're running into things that all email administrators have run into at some point.

I recommend you go with #2 - using Company A's SMTP relay. Just set that server as the smarthost in sendmail and it'll relay mail through it. This will still permit you to submit mail locally on the server, and sendmail will handle delivery from there on out.

Side note: of all the open-source MTAs out there, sendmail is without a doubt, the most difficult to understand and configure. I'd highly recommend forgetting sendmail and using postfix or exim instead. I use postfix exclusively, and it's the default MTA of nearly all linux distributions.

EEAA
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