Do I need to setup an SMTP MTA for a contact us form ?

You will need an MTA, but it doesn't need to handle incoming mail, so the default configuration of most MTAs should work just fine. No need to touch MX records or deal with SSL certificates.

On Debian-like OSes, you'd do "apt-get install default-mta" (or "apt-get install mailutils" to add some useful command line tools) and it would do the right thing. CentOS is somewhat more mysterious.

@hoopycat:

You will need an MTA, but it doesn't need to handle incoming mail, so the default configuration of most MTAs should work just fine. No need to touch MX records or deal with SSL certificates.

On Debian-like OSes, you'd do "apt-get install default-mta" (or "apt-get install mailutils" to add some useful command line tools) and it would do the right thing. CentOS is somewhat more mysterious.

Thanks for the reply but I'm confused, how will my emails be accepted by other mail servers if my server doesn't have a valid MX record, reverse lookup entry ? Whats to stop spammers from just setting up 100's of VPSs and spamming away ? Are Linodes IP ranges accepted by other orgs as safe ?

Many Thanks

Andy

A valid rDNS entry helps, as well as SPF records and Domain Keys. But in short, not a lot stops spammers from spinning up 100s of VPSs and spamming away, although if you're caught a reputable host will shut you down.

Nothing stops spammers from spinning up hundreds of VPSes with valid MX records and all the other things, either. There's nothing YOU can do that a spammer can't do as well, aside from click "Not Spam" each time your messages end up in your Gmail spam folder. That's how Gmail seems to do it, at least: messages go to the Spam folder by default, unless the originating IP address is "known" to be legitimate.

If you absolutely must get mail through, expect to pay someone like postmarkapp.com, amazonses.com, or even mailchimp.com to deliver messages for you. But, if it's just mail going to one mailbox and that mailbox is on Gmail, it doesn't take too long to train their spam filter.

O.K. thanks for all the input. I'll go and set that rails server up then :)

Regards

Andy