Cloud scripted email deliverabiltiy - any experiences? (NOTE not personal email I mean auto notifications etc and NOT bulk)

Hi I have a website currently on fairly cheap shared style hosting.

All is fine apart from scripted email deliverabitly. A lot of what I sent albeit via standard phpMailer or via SMTP has got spam filtered historically. Google apps for business would seem to refuse to send more than a couple of emails via SMTP before it just black holes everything.

Google have even flagged some of the messages sent from my site with 'this host is known for sending spam' with a reference to my shared server environment.

I am really interested in switching to the cloud but would like to know what peoples experiences of sending email notifications are and if anyone has had any deliverability issues?

And also maybe a little concerned that despite cloud sounding really good with some great features it is still ultimately a 'shared' environment meaning with regards to email reputation you will still be at the mercy of other cloud users to a point unless I am missing something?

NOTE I am NOT talking about bulk maybe 10 or 20 emails a day for the foreseeable future?

Thanks.

The Cloud does not provide mail service.

I've been recommending SkyToaster; I'm using their mail service (beta at this time, but no problems at all) myself, and have a client who registered their domain through SkyToaster and is using the two free email accounts that SkyToaster provides with that service.

Personally I prefer using SMTP from my MODX installs (that's a core MODX feature) as just using phpmail is very likely to get marked as spam. As Cloud doesn't offer the email hosting yet, you could use gmail or a third party email hoster such as SkyToaster. I personally haven't had email deliverability issues sending through SMTP.

I just found out the hard way that Bluehost has delivery limits (150/hour) even when you use Gmail SMTP, but they will raise them if you can convince them that you're not a spammer.

That is why I'm very fond of the perl DADA mail system. You can time your mailing to go out in blocks, thus reducing the load on the server. Bluehost specifically recommends it.

Quote from: sottwell at Jan 15, 2013, 01:16 AM

That is why I'm very fond of the perl DADA mail system. You can time your mailing to go out in blocks, thus reducing the load on the server. Bluehost specifically recommends it.

Both EmailResource and Notify allow you to set the batch size and batch delay, but I imagine they'd run into PHP timeout trouble if you used a long delay. I'll have to look into DADA.

http://forums.modx.com/thread/16889/dada-mail

It's for Evo, but that just means making a CMP instead of a module.

Another alternative would be hooking into something like Mandrill or Postmark. As they offer a SMTP "api", you just configure MODX to send email via their SMTP server and it takes care of the actual sending. No first hand experience with either though.

We would have probably used Mandrill at the time we chose Postmark for our own outbound email handling, but it didn't exist. Mandrill is free for sending up to 12,000 emails per month and you never have to worry about getting blacklisted, etc. You also get the added bonus of Mailchimp-like templates, deliverability reports, conditional text, etc.

http://blog.mandrill.com

(No affiliation with Mandrill, but I do love me some Mailchimp. Ben and his merry band of monkeys make great stuff.)

@ryan - have you used MODX with Mandrill before?

I've got a basic FormIt form running on a website hosted with MODX cloud.

Tried sending the form with default mail settings that come with a fresh installation but no email received. Signed-up to Mandrill (looks great btw!), entered the settings in to my MODX installation (System > System Settings > Mail), but no joy either.

I haven't added any DKIM or SPF settings to my domain name yet, as the project is still in testing/dev.

Do these settings look ok (see attached)?

Mandrill would make a great MODx add-on. I noticed there was one for Wordpress.