Hi Rick,

Is it wwipstuff.dll that sends mail? One of my busy servers and my dev server stopped being able to send mail recently. Are there other dll's that manage mail that maybe need to be white listed?

As usual, I did not purposely or knowingly change anything, sendmail just stopped ending. I use remote servers so its not my local isp blocking port 25 or 587...

Thoughts?

I emailed vultr support thinking they would blame me... Instead I received this. We have our answer. Now the question is, what is the workaround? Can we proxy somewhere and get the messages out that way or do we have to pay the kings ransom at a site like sendgrid?

Hello,

Thank you for contacting us. We have received your SMTP Unblock request. However before we can remove this block, we must verify additional information.

Please reply to this ticket with the following information:

1. The business name and organization URL(s) under which you offer services.
2. Describe, in as much detail as possible, the nature of the emails you intend to send.
3. The volume of email that you plan to deliver on a daily/monthly basis.

We need to know this information to make an informed decision regarding your account settings.

Please let us know if you have any questions.

Hi Michael,

1. How much email is being sent on a daily basis or monthly basis?

2. SMTP servers like sendgrid are free to use if you are within their limits. Free is 100 emails/day A paid plan is about $14.95/month and you get 40,000/month

3. If you think you don't want to pay $14.95/month, you have to set up your own smtp server.

Joy Tan

We use sendgrid now as a backup and for marketing. As it turned out, vultr.com accepted our use case and opened the ports. This of course solved the problem.

Thanks.

FWIW I agree with Joy on using a service for email sending. It's too much of a hassle to have to maintain an EMAIL server and make sure you don't get black listed, or worse never get white listed.

To get truly reliable email is much more expensive than what Joy mentions. I use MailGun which is similar - free and cheap levels are good, but you can end up on a blacklisted IP Address and get nothing delivered. They'll move you to another IP, but you have to detect the problem first. If you use dedicated IPs the price goes up significantly, but MG (and SendGrid I assume) actively will help you keep the IP clean from blacklisting.

Also making sure you use clean email addresses that are properly registered in your DNS records (which is painful - I can never figure this out correctly and always ask somebody to help) is important to ensure your mail gets through.

+++ Rick ---