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I'm sure this has been asked before, but for the life of me I can't find a question that covers exactly what I'm asking.

I've got a client who hosts their own domain. Godaddy's nameservers have all the A, CNAME, etc records and they point to my client's IP address (their ISP is SureWest in Kansas City).

However, my client's email is hosted on Gmail (Google Apps For Your Domain is what it used to be called I think). So, when any of their employees gets email, they go through the Gmail interface to read and to send.

However, they have an application (that I wrote so I have control over this) that sends emails on behalf of the system. This app can send quite a few emails (up to a couple thousand a day), to all different email addresses. These aren't unsolicited emails, and every one is unique.

I've currently got the app sending the email out through Microsoft SMTP Server since it's already installed and free. It seems to be working great (yeah, I had to do some obscure, to me, configuration with the SMTP server to get these emails to go out.)

Well, I think it's all working pretty well, but I have heard that you can do some other things like adding some sort of DNS entries to let receiving mail servers know that a certain ip address (in this case the external IP provided by SureWest) is allowed to send email on behalf of a domain.

Am I crazy? Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Are there any tutorials out there that can help me with this?

5 Answers 5

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What you are describing is the Sender Policy Framework (SPF). You can use this tool to walk you through configuring SPF records.

You will want to identify all servers that are authorized to send mail on behalf of your domain.

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  • That's a great tool. Thank you for the link. I'll upvote in the future assuming that I can get some rep on here.
    – user57609
    Oct 19, 2010 at 19:57
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Sender Policy Framework (SPF) See http://www.openspf.org/Introduction - it discusses GMail

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  • Thank you. I couldn't remember that at all. I can't upvote you until I get more rep (OpenID doesn't work from this machine, unfortunately, so my previously collected rep is of no help).
    – user57609
    Oct 19, 2010 at 19:57
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I think this might be of some help, configuring Google SMTP settings.

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=13287

Incoming Mail (POP3) Server - requires SSL: pop.gmail.com Use SSL: Yes Port: 995

Outgoing Mail (SMTP) Server - requires TLS or SSL: smtp.gmail.com (use authentication) Use Authentication: Yes Port for TLS/STARTTLS: 587 Port for SSL: 465 Account Name: your full email address (including @gmail.com or @your_domain.com) Email Address: your email address ([email protected] or username@your_domain.com) Password: your Gmail password

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Not sure if this completely answers your question, but you can set up an email address and enable POP/IMAP services from the settings in the Gmail interface; then have the app connect as a client that way, through Google's servers.

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You want to get your DNS configuration right. You should ensure your A and PTR records resolve to each other. DNS setup can also include SPF as others have noted, as well as DKIM. See my blog post on running an email server.

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