In one of my Rails applications I'm sending emails through the Gmail SMTP server and everything just works, mails are not going to spam and so on ... But there's one thing that concerns me, the 500messages/day limit the SMTP has, currently I'm over 350/day. I didn't find any official Google page where they talk about the subject, just blog posts that seems to be reliable. Then my question is what do you suggest me in order to be able to send more than 500messages/day? I would love to keep using the Gmail SMTP.
Any help would be appreciated.
Don't use GMail for what it wasn't built for. It wasn't designed as a mass-email system, although Google definitely has the firepower to do this.
Instead, perhaps use something like SendGrid to send your emails. SendGrid is designed for this and is just as easy (actually, probably easier) to set up with than GMail.
You can consider using more than one gmail account to access the smtp server, however you may have problems with ip limits (couldn't find anything on their docs about it). Another option is performing dns mx lookups yourself and reproducing your own smtp server by directly delivering the messages to the user's emails - but that can increase the odds of you being tagged as a spammer as your ip is not whitelisted as sender.
I think the best way is to create another gmail account and trying to reroute your connection to use it when one of the accounts reaches the daily limit. A vpn connection can solve that for you.
Related
I have problems sending mail from a ruby production app on heroku by a gmail smtp account.
Here i found the solution
When i apply the solution all works wel, but after a while the problems comes back.
Do i have to set something in my google account to make it permanent ?
I think it has to do with the fact that i am using a free heroku account.
The servers stops after a while an perhaps has to login in gmail when it starts up again.
There's no way to make it permanent because Gmail doesn't want its service to be used to send out automated e-mails(*).
There are some providers that will make it much easier for you:
https://sendgrid.com/pricing/ has a free plan (up to 100 emails/day)
https://postmarkapp.com/pricing gives you 10k emails for 10$)
or take your pick, because the market seem to be pretty saturated: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=e-mail+delivery+service&ia=web
(*) What I suspect they do (though I could not find info about it) is that they can see if "same e-mails" are sent within short intervals.
You might try your luck (if it makes sens, when for example it's a toy project) to alter each e-mail contents to make it seem like different e-mail each time. But it will be just easier to go with free option in any other providers that actually want you to use it in your app.
Woo-hoo! Thanks that we have mailhog for reliable Docker-based testing environments for outbound mail ... allowing us to easily debug mail-sending services without bothering production users ...
... but what about inbound emails?
On one of our sites, users can send an email to a designated support-address and their email will automagically be entered into a ticket system. (As you can well imagine, I am now tasked with replacing that system.) So, is(n't) there already a sort of "reverse mailhog" system, which would allow me to define an "incoming-mail server" which I could from time to time say "had just received thus-and-so message?"
Since this now seems to me to be "just as obvious a requirement as the one 'mailhog' so adroitly solved," I now ask the community – am I overlooking something wonderful that I literally don't yet know about? (Pretty-please tell me in your reply that the answer is 'yes.')
Has anyone seen any examples of how to run an smtp server with Rails hosted on heroku?
I'm interested to send mail to my own smtp server, manipulate the content with rails by adding a footer, adding link tracking etc, then send it out again.
Once I have the data, easy. Not sure where to begin in terms of setting up smtp.
Alternatively, are there any smtp services out there that will simply POST the data to my app?
Take a look at SendGrid here http://sendgrid.com/
They've got some great APIs, and should be able to enable what you want.
If you want inbound email via a post to your application look at cloudmailin.com
It's python, not RoR, but the Lamson project is pretty close to what you are talking about.
http://lamsonproject.org/
(Thanks Zed!)
Requirement:
I am writing a web application (Rails on Heroku) through which users can create groups and user should be able to post a message to the group simply by sending an email to the group.
This is what tumblr.com does: each blog is associated with an email address(randomly generated) and user can post to the blog simply by sending an email. Also posterous.com has this feature.
Question:
What is the best way to architect a solution like this one? Comments? Ideas?
I see 2 ways of doing this:
1) Hosting my own email server (sendmail or postfix) on Amazon EC2 and having some script to process all the incoming email?
This will give me a lot of control but an email server to maintain.
2) Have the email server hosted somewhere and just have to write the email processing script would be nice however I do not know of any email cloud service to which you can tell: "please accept all the email for mydomain.com".
Thanks in advance for any help.
I think I am going to go with http://cloudmailin.com. They even have a nice Heroku plug-in. It would be nice to hear any good or bad experience from somebody that tried this out.
You could have the emails sent to GMail through their SMTP servers and run some sort of crontab to pull down the emails from GMail, and process them from there.
They do allow you to have emails sent to your domain.com, see this page:
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html
When a user completes an order at my online store, he gets an email confirmation.
Currently we're sending this email via Gmail (which we chose over sendmail for greater portability) after we authorize the user's credit card and before we show him a confirmation message (i.e., synchronously).
It's working fine in development, but I'm wondering if this will cause a problem in production. Will it require making the user wait too long? Will many simultaneous Gmail connections get us in trouble? Any other general caveats?
If sending the emails synchronously will be a problem, could someone recommend an asynchronous solution (is ar_mailer any good?)
The main issue I can think of is that Gmail limits the amount of email you can send daily, so if you get too many orders a day it might break.
As they say :
"In an effort to fight spam and
prevent abuse, Google will temporarily
disable your account if you send a
message to more than 500 recipients or
if you send a large number of
undeliverable messages. If you use a
POP or IMAP client (Microsoft Outlook
or Apple Mail, e.g.), you may only
send a message to 100 people at a
time. Your account should be
re-enabled within 24 hours. "
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=22839
I would recommend using sendmail on your server in order to have greater control over what's going on and don't depend on another service, especially when sendmail is not really complicated to set up.
The internet is not as resilient as some people would have you believe, the link between you and GMail will break at some point or GMail will go offline causing the user to think that they have not paid sucessfully.
I would put some other queue in place, sendmail sounds acceptable and you can't create your site now for where it 'might' be hosted in the future.
Ryan
If the server waits for the email to be sent before giving the user any feedback, were there problems connecting to the mailserver (timeouts, server down etc) the user request would timeout too and he wouldn't be told anything about the status of his order, so I believe you should really do this asynchronously.
Also, you should check whether doing that is even allowed by GMail's TOS. If that's not the case, you may check if that's allowed if you purchase one of their subscriptions. Also, there's surely a limit to the number of outgoing emails you may send within a given timeframe so if you're expecting your online store to be successful, you may hit that limit and bump into some nasty issue. If you're not self-hosting the site, you should check whether your host offers email servers (several plans include them for free) as then using your host's ISP would be the most obvious choice.
FACT: Gmail crashes. Not often, but it happens, and you can't control it or test it.
The simplest quick-fix is to start a separate thread or fork a subprocess to send the email. Yes, there likely will arise problems from using Gmail, and I really have no input on that vs. the alternatives. But from a design perspective, there's just no reason to make the user wait for that process to complete.
From a testing perspective, this might be where a proxy pattern might come in handy. It might be easy for you to directly invoke Gmail to send a message. Make it harder. Put in a proxy object that does the mailing for you that you can turn off (because heaven knows you can't for testing purposes make Gmail crash). Just make your team follow what happens in the event of an email malfunction by turning off the proxy and trying to complete an order. If you are doing it synchronously, then all the plagues mentioned here by other posters will rear their heads. If you are doing it asynchronously, you should be able to allow it to fail silently (from the user's perspective--from your perspective there should be enormous logging statements and text messages in the middle of the night and possibly a mild electric current arcing across the surface of someone's skin).