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Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

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Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#141

Post by hk__2 »

masukomi wrote: post #114
chatmasta wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like a cryptographic way to achieve the aliasing scheme many people already use, e.g "chatmasta+hackernews@gmail.com". Your proposal requires at least the status quo (aliased email address at signup), but the problem is it also requires cooperation of the receiver's email provider (e.g. gmail) and the sender's email provider. You are unlikely to ever see any new standard adopted by all major email provide…

why not just add +sitename to your email when you sign up..... eg me@example.com becomes me+flickr@example.com ? it's just a comment that will be ignored. I don't feel that we need software support to help with that. Your password manager will store that address (since it's probably your username) and help you fill it in / remember it when you come back to the site.

> it's just a comment that will be ignored.

It’s not a comment. Some mail services allow you to have aliases in the form of normal-username+something@service.com but that doesn’t mean all do. If it were a comment the address +@example.com would be invalid but it’s not. Comments in email addresses are written in parentheses like username(i'm_a_comment)@example.com.

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#142

Post by WA »

Awesome, I've been waiting for this, because I don't believe in the "delivery" promise of big brand mail providers. Most newsletters* go to spam, no matter if they're via Mailchimp, Aweber or transactional mail providers.

Maybe the big names work better with Gmail, since Gmail has quite an aggressive spam filtering. But neither I, nor most of my customers (Germans) use Gmail, so I don't care.

Edit: *most newsletters I receive

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#143

Post by user5994461 »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #109
drdaeman wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correction: large^W giant mail systems, that can observe a significant portion of world's mail, and have a lot of R&D resources, do a very good job at fighting spam (in their own systems). A DIY home mailserver will still let, like, 5-15% of spam emails slip through.

Even with Gmail I still find enough false-positives on spam to make me troll through it daily to make sure important emails don't get sent there.

Gmail does an incredible job.

The last few times I went to spam and saw emails that shouldn't be in there, a careful inspection revealed they were actually very well crafted phishing messages.

Ever since, I don't bother checking the spam folder. Too dangerous. Gmail is smarter than me.

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#144

Post by dogecoinbase »

jccalhoun wrote: post #105

Is it common now to call email "mail?" I don't know anything about this area (never even heard of mailgun or sendgrid) and wondered if this was some kind of service for sending actual mail.

What about sendmail, or /usr/bin/mail?

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#145

Post by user5994461 »

_jal wrote: post #73
parenthephobia wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From personal experience, if you're not jumping straight from no emails to a million an hour, your mail setup is good (SPF/DKIM/etc), you're not reusing a IP address that was sending spam last week (so be wary sending from cloud servers), and you aren't actually sending spam, then you can send from your own infrastructure just fine.

This is true, with the exception of AT&T. The Deathstar rejects all mail from my server, despite (a) no spam ever having been emitted from my domain in almost 20 years, (b) the IP having been stable for coming on eight years, and (c) I don't send bulk mail. Best I can tell, their blacklist-removal process is auto-deny with no humans in the loop. I gave up and decided screw them, I don't need to talk to anyone with an…

You need to configure SPF and DKIM, irrelevant of what reputation and service you have.

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#146

Post by brightball »

ushi wrote: post #132
brightball wrote: post #76

I'm most interested to see what their solution for handling INCOMING email looks like. Having used the inbound APIs with the others they are all pretty polished and reliable but have inconsistent APIs. I've always been a little bit concerned about how to handle high volumes of inbound email functionality if the prices on those services ever went up.

We are running this[0] with some postfix boxes in front of it. Works quite well for us. [0] https://github.com/ushis/mailhook

I'll have to check it out.

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#148

Post by oblib »

I took a look at the github project and I hope they do great.

As a side project I've been working on setting up my own mail server using "Mail-in-a-Box" (https://mailinabox.email) for about a month now.

It's been a learning process but I do like the idea of having control over this. I've got it set up to send emails from a remote app server using a perl script and an email account configured on my Mac Mail app all working.

Mail-in-a-Box is really pretty sweet. It walks you through the install and has a very nice Control Panel that handles DNS and user account setup and it comes with the Roundcube email web client and ownCloud.

There are hurdles. I got a clean IP from DigitalOcean with no problem, but the domain name I'm using is new and has no reputation so when I tested it last week sending emails from the app server to my personal Gmail account the Gmail server responded saying:

"Our system has detected that this message is 421-4.7.0 suspicious due to the very low reputation of the sending IP address. 421-4.7.0 To protect our users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has 421-4.7.0 been temporarily rate limited."

I only sent about a dozen emails, all to my own Gmail account, so that seems to be a bit harsh.

Then it occurred to me why Gmail exists and it made a lot more sense. So, there are hurdles.

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#149

Post by oblib »

jonknee wrote: post #122
cbhl wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't spammers just start adopting Postal on their servers, too?

Judging from the amount of it the sending email portion is not what spammers struggle with. It's the "maintain your own IP with a great reputation" part. How would Postal help?

That's apparently a process that takes time, but in the long run it could easily pay off. Over the years I've dealt with "Verio" selling my ip address to spammers. Before that they had entire ranges of IP blocked that I got caught up in.

A couple years ago I did the work to use "Mandrill" in an app and they got merged with "MailChimp" who changed how my app could use their service and I had to redo those routines again.

Right now I'm using Mailgun and they're awesome.

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#150

Post by teddyh »

agopaul wrote: post #62
eloff wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you check if an IP is good or spammy? It would be nice to get an elastic IP in the cloud, test it for spamminess, and give back the bad ones. Catch and release fishing for IPs.

I found this service a few days ago to monitor our own deliverability. It allows you to test if your emails are delivered by the most common ESPs: https://glockapps.com (I do not have anything to do with the product or team behind it)

Similar service here:

https://www.mail-tester.com/

(I am likewise unaffiliated.)

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