[TriLUG] Sendmail questions:

[Ron Young]

My thanks to Jon and Aaron.  I am significantly into reading the sendmail
link that Jon sent and appreciate the guidance of Aaron.
This is a quarterly emailing to a list of folks who have asked in person
when visiting the shop to receive these emails so I hope that solves the
spam issue.

The mailman app is certainly something I will look into for this small
business.  Thanks again!

Did I understand that I can limit the number of emails that postfix sends to
the upstream isp to a certain number per hour?




Ron Young
919-621-9015


On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 11:04 AM, Aaron Joyner <aaron at joyner.ws> wrote:

> Please forgive the "crickets" response (or lack there-of).  What
> you're essentially asking is "How do I spam people"?  I trust that
> your intentions are honest, then again most sources of bulk email
> (unsolicited or not) believe their intentions are honest.  :)  Asking
> how to defeat the outbound spam filtering of your hosting provider
> obviously raises some red flags.
>
> As for setting up a box and using it as a relay for your email, it's
> not very difficult, there are plenty of guides on doing this available
> via a web search.  Rate limiting outgoing mail is also possible, as is
> doing it at a specific rate per-destination.  This too is easily
> discovered with a bit of Googling.  As for mail servers, I'd generally
> suggest that you'll have more luck with postfix than with sendmail,
> given the level of sophistication of your request.  The postfix
> configuration tends to involve more flat configuration text files in
> key=value format, and less macro language compiled into complicated
> definition formats.
>
> A word of warning, in advance.  Attempting to send your mail out
> directly to the recipients, as you suspect, will be met with all kinds
> of problems.  First off, your ISP very likely will firewall
> connections from your IP, to most anywhere on the internet, destined
> to port 25.  They do this to limit viruses on clueless home users'
> compromised windows boxes being used as mail relays.  If your ISP
> doesn't firewall your traffic, but you still use a "residential" style
> connection (cable, DSL, etc) where this server will live, it's very
> likely the large senders will list you as a "residential" IP address,
> and not accept mail from you directly.  The common / recommended
> solution is to 'smarthost' or 'relay' your mail through your ISP's
> mail server.  This gives them control and responsibility over the mail
> you send, and as such you're likely to see them impose limits, such as
> you can't send more than X mails per hour, per account, or they shut
> you down.  Hence, you're pretty much back where you started.
>
> So, that's the rough tour of sending mail on the internet.  I hope
> it's been enlightening.  If you insist on sending out repeated
> mailings to a large list of users, I'd strongly urge you to setup a
> mailing list, using common mailing list software such as GNU mailman.
> This handles the common problem of allowing users to conveniently
> unsubscribe from your mailings.  Mailman does not give you the ability
> to do rate limiting, if you need to do this, you'll still need to do
> it at the MTA (mail server) level.
>
> Aaron S. Joyner
>
>
>
> On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 10:27 PM, Ron Young <ronyoung at nc.rr.com> wrote:
> > I have a situation where we need to send about 800 emails to a customer
> list
> > about every quarter.  The email server is located at a commercial site,
> > iPower that also hosts the web site.  They have a 500 email per hour
> limit
> > when they lock the email account.
> > The software we are using to manage the shop and send these emails is
> > specific to the industry and wants to send them all in a batch without
> > stopping.
> > I am placing a CentOS box in the shop soon and wondered if I could get
> > sendmail to accept the emails from this windoze program and send say 300
> > emails to the upstream hosting site and then wait a little over an hour
> and
> > send 300 more, etc. until the whole list for that batch is sent?
> >
> > Or is there an even better way to do that?
> >
> > One fear that I have is that if I set up a mail domain (or whatever you
> call
> > it) that runs strictly on the shop linux box then I run the risk of
> getting
> > on blacklists when we do these batch emailings.
> >
> > I have never set up or administered a sendmail server but am willing,
> even
> > eager to learn.  I would also like it to be an outbound server only and
> > never receive email so I don't have to mess with spamassassin, etc.
> >
> > Thanks in advance to all for the benefit of your knowledge and
> experience.
> >
> >
> > Ron Young
> > 919-621-9015
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