SMTP relay or what to do if your server is in the email blacklist

If suddenly innocent emails from your site started to fall into the spam boxes of mailers, this may mean that the IP of your server is in the email blacklist. The likelihood of this increases if you do not have your own server. An example scenario for getting into a blacklist is as follows:

• Yuri Ivanovich, director of a small dance studio, has a website "next door" to you (read on the same server). At one point, Yuri Ivanovich learns about the wonderful prospects of email marketing and sends out a bundle of twenty thousand letters with the same type of advertisement for his studio.
• Or, Vasya Popov, who does not use antivirus software but loves old versions of Total Comander, updates his homepage via FTP. At one point, a previously sleeping trojan steals passwords for Vasya FTP (which are insecure in the Total Comander folder). The next day, Vasina’s homepage already sends a ten thousandth offer to buy Viagra.
• Or, Petya Tverdokhlebov, who has a site on Drupal version 5.0 nearby and thinks that updates are “from the evil one”, on the next sunny day catches XSS vulnerability and starts, without knowing it, to send advertising to potential buyers of penis-enlargment pills.

In all cases, these letters go through many gateways, which, seeing a large stream of identical letters from a neutral IP, put this IP on the black list “until clarification”. Mail services such as Gmail and Yahoo use the data from these blacklistes to run their anti-spam, so in the best case, messages from your site will be in the spam folder.

Therefore, when you receive the tenth letter from users of the site that password recovery does not work, or the letter of sale has not arrived, you should check to see if you are in the blacklist .

If you are there, you have two choices - either change the IP / server / hosting, or reconcile, because on a shared or even on vps, this is fate. If this happened to your own server, first kill the very reason for the appearance of spam, and then go through the blacklist, and manually delete yourself from there. They say it helps. If you don’t believe fairy tales, just change the IP address of the server, now it costs not so much.

In any case, as a temporary solution, you can use someone else's SMTP server to send site letters.

Using someone else's SMTP server with Drupal

To get started, you need to find this very server. If you already have it - fine. If not, you can buy yourself access, there are enough offers right now. One of these services, smtp2go, has recently come in very handy for me . For symbolic 30 bucks, in 15 minutes you will be sending out mail without barriers.

To send mail correctly, you will need the following data:

• SMTP server address
• Port
• E-mail from which the mailing will be carried out
• (optional) login and password for SMTP authentication

To tie this all to Drupal, you will need to use the SMTP Authentication Support module . When installing, be sure to read README.TXT, the module needs a third-party library, which will have to be downloaded.

The module is a form in which you will need to enter all of the above.


He will do the rest automatically.