Email setup recommendations for e-greeting card-like app?
Quick background: I created an iPhone app called Flower Garden
Right now that's working fine, but I'm on a shared webhost and they have some strict email limits because of spam policies. So far I've been under the 200 emails/hour limit (barely) but things are probably going to take off next week with Mother's Day, so I need to find another solution and Linode came highly recommended and seems to fit all my needs (and a lot more!).
Bouquet emails sent from Flower Garden have a From: field of something like
The iPhone client uses a subdomain of snappytouch.com to contact the host, so I could move just that subdomain over to Linode to start.
This is where I get all fuzzy and I need some help. I believe that if I just did that, emails would probably get flagged as spam because snappytouch.com is still in a different host (I wouldn't move the full domain right away). That means I couldn't set up rdns to be the Linode host. To make things worse, I'm using Google for email in snappytouch.com, so my MX records point to Google.
[Edit]A bit more info: The email right now is sent through php using phpMailer. So that means I can use sendmail or postfix I believe, in case that matter.
Is there some obvious solution I'm missing, or am I better off getting a new domain (like fgsnappytouch.com) and setting that up to be the Linode host and sending email from that address?
Does this make sense? I'd love to hear any comments or suggestions.
Thanks!
–Noel
2 Replies
You should be okay moving your php mailing application to the linode and running it through your linode's postfix or sendmail server to relay.
The other option I'd look into is using Gmail's SMTP servers to relay. This gives the problem of it modifying all from: headers to the address of the account, but setting up a
Google does have restrictions on how many you can send per day though, so look into that.
EDIT: To help avoid the spam filters, I'd suggest setting up an SPF record containing all the services that are responsible for sending mail from your domain.
I did check and Gmail has a 500 email/day limit, so that's definitely out of the question (or I could get 100 Gmail accounts and have the script spread them out… hmmm… Actually, that's not a horrible idea. It has built-in redundancy too. Nice
I'll look this weekend into switching over to Linode the php script that sends the emails. I'm sure once I start doing it I'll have more specific questions on setting up the SPF record.
Cheers.