We have a website sending mail alerts to end users. The site has been developed in c# ASP.NET.
I want to find the best way to send the email alerts to my users. Making sure the mail is not trapped in any spam filters. I read on the internet it is best to sent the mail directly from the web server and not route via an SMTP mail service such as google apps or Postini.
Can anyone tell me if this is correct?
First of all
Making sure the mail is not trapped in
any spam filters
Is not possible - otherwise spammers would do this. You just have to make sure you're domain isn't associated with any spamming activities and watch for keywords within the email.
I read on the internet it is best to
sent the mail directly from the web
server and not route via an SMTP mail
service such as google apps or
Postini.
This point doesn't make sense - your e-mail will never be delivered if it doesn't get routed via an SMTP server, the average message will pass through multiple on its route to the recipient.
The answer is to not actually send email and let someone else deal with the problem. I'd look at postmark or Amazon's simple email service.
We had problems that mails sent with local server often get trapped in spam filters until we implemented SPF on our mail server.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework
But I am not admin, that's just what our admin said, and after that we have no problems anymore.
btw. maybe would be better to ask on serverfault.com
Related
I am Creating an application in c# . I have to know how can I know the status of the sended email.The status May be.
4. Track sent emails to determine if they were:
4.1 delivered
4.2 opened
4.3 recipient opt-out
4.4 bounced (with the reason for the bounce)
4.5 time/date sent
4.6 which links in the email were clicked (and time/date they were clicked)
4.7 IP address, if user clicked any links in the email
Should I use Any API or Dll or something else.Please help .Any Help will be Appreciated.
If you program your application to send mail through a hosted SMTP server like http://www.sendgrid.com or http://www.ultrasmtp.com, you can access the delivery status of messages that you've sent.
There is no easy way to do what you want. Actually this status can be tracked by your SMTP server itself and if you are using some third-party SMTP server like GMail or any corporate server, I 'm afraid they won't give you access to those information without using a authenticated client.
From your C# program, if the SmtpClient.Send() method returns true, you can assume the mail has been delivered to the SMTP server. If in case, the delivary fails, you should receive a mail to the outbound mail ID's inbox. If you want to make outbound mails appear in your outbox, you should configure IMAP/POP3 configurations accordingly.
There is no API or DLL available in exact form you want, as far as I know. You can try some other way like tracking a hash or embedded image in the mail-body from your server. But these are not reliable way as most mordern Messaging services have counter-measures for this.
Just as the question says.
I am using IIS 6 to send emails out from my Windows Server with C#. I want to detect bounces with C# from the SMTP email server. Right now, all the bounces get sent to a Gmail account. I could just check and parse each email in that account, but I was wondering if there is any easier way like hooking up a windows service or something to the IIS 6 SMTP server.
Help?
Thanks!
I know little about the IIS6 SMTP server, but based on what I know about SMTP in general, I doubt you're going to have much luck. Your message to joe#foo.com gets forwarded from server to server until it ends up at the foo.com SMTP server, which then responds to the reply-to address that the "joe" mailbox doesn't exist. That server may have no direct contact with your SMTP server at all.
As a result, there's no opportunity for the IIS6 SMTP server to receive any information about the bounced message. I think your existing idea of polling the inbox for the reply-to address is probably going to be your best bet.
I have an email application where a user can fill out a form and the info get's mail to the form admin. I have the correct server and email credentials being set and i do not get any errors when the mail is sent. The To and From addresses are the same (admin#thedomain.com) It is like the mail is somewhere in limbo. I know the email account works, because I send mail to it from outlook. Any thoughts?
update:
Regarding code, I have created an abstraction to the System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient class. I can set another server and the code works. The server that does work is within my host’s network. The server that does not work is outside of the network. Strange thing is, like I said, I can setup the account in OutLook and I can send / receive mail fine. I’ll have to check with my vendor to see if the mail is indeed getting to their server.
My guess is permissions. Can your app send an email to your address?
I believe .net's system.web.mail sends email via relay. You need to check with your email admin to determine if your IP address is allowed on the server to relay mail.
It turned out to be a DNS issue with my hosting company. I could send mail via outlook becuase I was direclty connecting to the mail servers. The MX records were screwed up. Thanks to all who looked
As part of my app's config process, I have a sanity checker that validates all user-supplied data. This includes email server settings that the app uses to send email.
I'd like a simple sanity check on those settings without actually sending any email. It'd be great if this could support all standard flavors of SMTP setups including those with authentication/ssl/etc.
It doesn't need to be exhaustive but the more coverage, the better.
Currently all I do is verify I can open a connection to the given server on the given port. Something a little deeper would be nice.
Note: I'm not trying to validate email addresses--that's not relevant to this question.
You just open a raw connection to the server & port that the user supplies and do a
HELO Server.Domain.Com
Mail From: validaccount#domain.com
to see if you get a valid HELO response & Sender OK Response
(if smtp authentication is enabled).
Same as you would do if you telnet direct to the server.
http://www.petri.co.il/test_smtp_service.htm
This might also be useful
http://qmail.jms1.net/test-auth.shtml
I'm sure someone brighter and more qualified will pipe up with a better answer. However, at first blush I'd say that you cannot verify the ability to successfully send email without actually sending an email.
However, if you want to automate the process, you can have a 'MyApp_SanityCheck#gmail.com' (or your local domain) address.
Then you can create a watchdog application that monitors that email address, or just a simple app which programmatically interfaces with that email address and checks if an email was received within X minutes. This way you can be 100% certain that the emails are able to be sent out.
This link shows how to programmatically check gmail addresses.
An important note: If you application is sending out external emails, then it would be best if the email address you use is external, because it is possible that your server could be unable to send external emails, but internal emails go through just fine, and in that case your sanity check would send up a false positive.
I have a job that runs which sends out emails to our users to which starts off a work flow process in our company. Periodically, a user will swear up and down that they didn't receive the email - though, when we go to the mail administrator to pull an exchange report, 10 times out of 10 it's in their deleted items. :P
I'd like to be able to programmatically verify that messages sent via .net C# (System.Net.Mail I think) reached the user's mail box.
It's exchange 2007 and all messages are internal.
You can't with System.Net.Mail. You'll have to dig through Exchange's APIs to determine if an email is present in someone's email account.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/813349
Set an account for catching all bounce backs. In this way you will know which ones reached and which ones did not. This is the best way to ensure emails reached.
Alternatively you can add read reciepts via message headers(by setting the Disposition-Notification-To). but again, user can chose not to read it...
I see two ways to do what you want:
Send emails with "delivery confirmation" On (not "read receipt", this can be dismissed by the user as CoddeToGlory said). Then it's jut a matter of monitoring the mailbox that receives these confirmations via any way it's appropiate to you: Exchange Web Services, Outlook+COM or VBA, MAPI, ...
Use the powershell interface to Exchange and capture the output of Get-MessageTrackingLog looking for StoreDriver + Deliver events.