Setup business mail on your server in a way it guarantees mail delivery (easy)

This post a little longer than i thought, but worth your time

Too many time i hear from people they have take the step to dedicated server or a vps to grow their business and look more professional to only fall in the email bounce, spam pit. One party says it is this the other says it that and google, hotmail and every one else keep rejecting your emails and sending them to the spam folder.

Your well build business who looked so great is now being taken down by your own mail delivery. I have heard people go crazy and running all over the place trying to figure out how to solve this issue.

Well the solution is very easy when you know where to look at. Basically you email is being tested on several key points to see if is a genuine email informing people or if it is spam or even worse. The rules about this extent to even the ip. So you message can be perfect but your ip or dns can still have it end up in the trash. To get this all sorted just by yourself is going to be almost impossible, so lets take a short cut.

What you can use an smtp relay. The one i suggest people is mandrill but there are plenty other out there who do the same great job. Mandrill gives you 12k free emails you can send so if you are not doing big email sending you should be ok with that. After that it is going to cost money but not even that much. They have a nice dashboard where you can see how many email have been delivered and opened and much more. You can really get a good insight if you would like too. But the most important thing is that they have 100% delivery grantee . Let them do the hard part you just have to setup the smtp with your server. Sounds hard, well it is not.

Most of the people use cpanel which is greate and easy to use. If you do the following in cpanel you will be sending mails in no time. With a little bit of luck your hosting company is able to help you out with this.

Ok here we go.

Step 1

Go to

WHM → Service Configuration → Exim Configuration Manager → Basic Editor

Step 2

In “Mail → Smarthost support”, add the following

*: smtp.mandrillapp.com

Step 3

Browse to

WHM → Service Configuration → Exim Configuration Manager → Advanced Editor

Step 4

Search for – “Section: AUTH” & add the following code. Change youremail@yourdomain : api-key with your email & Mandrill API Key

auth_login:

driver = plaintext

public_name = LOGIN

hide client_send = : youremail@yourdomain : api-key

Step 5

Search for – “Section: PREROUTERS” & add the following code.

smart_route:

driver = manualroute

domains = ! +local_domains

ignore_target_hosts = 127.0.0.0/8

transport = auth_relay

route_list = * smtp.mandrillapp.com

no_more

Step 6

Search for – “Section: TRANSPORTSTART” & add the following code.

auth_relay:

driver = smtp

port = 587

hosts_require_auth = $host_address

hosts_require_tls = $host_address


Step 7

Save the configuration them restart exim using

service exim restart

Send an email test your setup.

There are several other things you can setup with help of the mandrill dashboard, like spf, dkim and your own tracking domain. They have an excellent way of explaining how to set this up in your dns records. It might sound hard but just read over it and in case you stuck let me know and i will try to help you from here.

This solution will give a back the assurance that your emails are being delivered.

Hope this was help full.

 

If any one has any questions regarding setup, let me know i will try to explain or help you/