Cloudron's email server
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How many people use Cloudron to manage their email server? It's very tempting for me to click the button that says to let Cloudron to handle it but that's a big step!
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@YurkshireLad said in Cloudron's email server:
How many people use Cloudron to manage their email server? It's very tempting for me to click the button that says to let Cloudron to handle it but that's a big step!
These days, email are tricky to send with any project you name it I tried all of them (Yunohost, MailCow, Mailru, HestiaCP, VestaCP, ISPConfig...) Respecting the best practice as Cloudron and other projects do it not enough anymore to ensure the deliverability.
Even if you're IP have a clean reputation inside a clean neighborhood (AS), big provider such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo maintain their own blacklist and manage it at their conveniency.
(This is way more and more Provider such as Linode and UpCloud block by default sending email and you have to show you know want you want to do, to keep an excellent reputation of their network)
As Cloudron recommend, it is better to relay on a 3rd party to send email (even if the idea is a little sad) than calling every person after you sent them an email to ensure the reliability of your email service.
Without the 3rd party to send; you will receive your email Cloudron and/or other solution are great for this but to send the dependancy goes over your control.
And don't forget after all, all the beauty of Internet (IP) is based on the Best Effort Delivery which means miracle happen at every packet you send and receive (Ok, I pushed far the idea but it's almost true).
If I could tell you something, I'm in IT since 30 years now (yes I plugged dactylo into netware), and @girish and @nebulade know what they are doing so Yes you could use their stack to receive your email and also follow their advice and use 3rd parties to ensure the reliability of your delivery.
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Thanks. I've been using ElasticMail to relay notification emails from my site but they always end up in spam. That may be due to the domain name, I don't know.
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@YurkshireLad said in Cloudron's email server:
but they always end up in spam
you should investigate with tools like MxToolBox
and/or ask support to ElasticMail
because it is not suppose too. -
@JOduMonT said in Cloudron's email server:
As Cloudron recommend, it is better to relay on a 3rd party to send email
Where do @girish @nebulon recommend that?
Ah, I guess perhaps you mean in the docs here:
https://cloudron.io/documentation/email/#relay-outbound-mailsWhere it says:
Relay outbound mails
By default, Cloudron's built-in mail server sends out email directly to recipients. You can instead configure the Cloudron to hand all outgoing emails to a 'mail relay' or a 'smart host' and have the relay deliver it to recipients. Such a setup is useful when the Cloudron server does not have a good IP reputation for mail delivery or if server service provider does not allow sending email via port 25 (which is the case with Google Cloud and Amazon EC2).
Personally I don't take that as a recommendation, just an option.
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@jdaviescoates I agree, but have asked myself the same question. Is it a recommendation or an option? Would be awesome do have some official statement from @girish or @nebulon about the email situation.
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@stantropics said in Cloudron's email server:
recommendation or an option
fine it's an option,
not a recommendation
and definitely not a necessity
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@YurkshireLad I would like to share my thoughts as I have been asking myself the very same question.
My initial motivation has been to de-google and to become more privacy-conscious. Following the well-known line "When something is "for free" you become the product" I've looked at many commercial solutions, that advertise to be privacy focussed: Mailfence, mailbox.org, Tutanota, ProtonMail, to just name a view. Those are all fine choices.
Then I wanted to learn more about what's out there in the FOSS space and came across:https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#email
The below referenced site taught me the "ins and outs" in detail and I really got my teeth into things:
https://workaround.org/ispmail/buster/
I came to realize that self-administering a mail server is too much for me.
In looking at many of the before mentioned "out of the box" solutions like MailCow, iRedMail, Mail-in-a-box, etc. I finally settled with Cloudron for my e-mail needs.
For me, this is an excellent choice. And while Cloudron does not position itself as a Mail Server solution, it is surprisingly well done. Really well done.
The interface to set up users, aliases, mail-domains, etc is slick, simple, yet powerful. The backup solution is well established. And the whole thing is integrated into so much more than just e-mail.
I am not only very happy, but also convinced that I have the best solution that meets my needs.
I can - from personal experience - highly recommend giving this solution a very hard look. -
I really wanted to use the built-in smtp server, but customers complained that mails to Google and Microsoft were almost always rejected, even though cloudron has a perfect spam score.
Had to switch to sendgrid (had shared ips which were blacklisted), moved to mailjet after that and this seems to go quite well for the time being. But in a perfect world I would go back to the built-in system, because technically it works fine, but those giants forced me to use an external solution
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@msbt
I‘d be careful with Mailjet... https://forum.cloudron.io/post/8901
They don’t notify you when they stop relaying mail. -
@msbt Honestly a lot of it has to do with the fact that Google (in particular) but also Microsoft and others pretty much are at a point where they mark email from any IP they haven't received email from yet (or not enough of it) as spam/junk. Typically it'll still arrive but at the junk box, at least in my experience. But after a few months of sending emails, my emails no longer end up in junk boxes anymore, even to people I haven't sent to yet. So it takes persistence. You can definitely use the built-in SMTP server, but it takes that persistence for a few months.
Unfortunately, that isn't feasible in many cases so if you can't afford to wait months then third-party SMTP servers are your best bet. In my experience unfortunately though I've had a number of issues with a few of those too so I eventually opted to have full control and own my own SMTP server and work it until it was recognized by Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, etc. and thankfully it worked well (after a lot of waiting, haha).
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@d19dotca said in Cloudron's email server:
my own SMTP server and work it until it was recognized by Gmail,
You must send a lot of email from the same IP because the https://gmail.com/postmaster/ need a few thousand of email every months to consider your IP/server has a mail server
but I'm glad to hear than with a good IP (from OVH) it's still feasible.
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@JOduMonT I definitely don't send that much, haha. Maybe a few hundred from my server between all the users on it, and even that's probably a stretch since not all of those would be addressed to a Gmail box. What you're stating must not be a requirement though otherwise I'd have definitely never made to a Gmail mailbox. haha.
I assume there a lot of factors that go into it, the biggest I believe is following as many best practices as you can from this page, and having Gmail users whitelist / mark as not junk your messages so that it'll eventually tell Google it's safe, as those aren't per mailbox and generally feed into Google's spam logic for everyone.
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?hl=en&ref_topic=7279058
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@will said in Cloudron's email server:
@msbt I second sendgrid. Easy, awesome, free. Bullet proof so far.
You misunderstood, I went away from sendgrid because of shared blacklisted IPs, my Cloudron IPs were fine. But before that, it was working flawless.
@d19dotca yea I've read about that and tried a few weeks, even months, but my customers don't have that much volume, so there's no chance to ever get whitelisted by the big players.
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@necrevistonnezr said in Cloudron's email server:
@msbt
I‘d be careful with Mailjet... https://forum.cloudron.io/post/8901
They don’t notify you when they stop relaying mail.What was the reason for them to stop relaying? I'm using webhooks to catch events for blocked emails, but that probably doesn't cover stopping their services at a whole.
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Actually this is all about sending mails it seems (which is the most problematic part though) but sending mails would already be done by OPs Cloudron, regardless whether Cloudron manages his mailboxes or not.
Also I would not say that we recommend mail server usage only with a relay, it very much depends on the circumstances as already discussed here.Personally I also host all my mailboxes on my personal Cloudron, up until recently also sending directly out of there, however recently I moved everything to a home-server and now the relay support comes in handy
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@msbt said in Cloudron's email server:
@necrevistonnezr said in Cloudron's email server:
@msbt
I‘d be careful with Mailjet... https://forum.cloudron.io/post/8901
They don’t notify you when they stop relaying mail.What was the reason for them to stop relaying? I'm using webhooks to catch events for blocked emails, but that probably doesn't cover stopping their services at a whole.
This was their response after I opened a ticket - mind you that is 5 days after they stopped relaying mails without informing me and with a volume of maybe 10 mails a day received / sent:
Thank you for contacting us. Our compliance team needs some additional information before the account can be activated. Please provide us with the following information: 1) What is the nature of your business? 2) How are contacts added to your mailing lists? Are the lists created over time through a registration form on your website; purchased from third parties; collected offline? 3) How are your contact lists managed and maintained? 4) When you send transactional messages - How are they triggered? - Can you please send us a sample message? Thanks in advance - I look forward to your feedback.
