Category: Advice

A lot of the applications customers install (such as wordpress, drupal, phpBB, and so on) send emails as part of their operation – emails to the customer (“a new user has registered”) and also emails to the users who register (“confirm your account”, “a new item has been posted”). A potential issue with these are that services can easily categorise this sort of mail as spam – very commonly the sender details aren’t setup correctly (mail comes from “wordpress@localhost” or similar) or they’re very sparse or dubious in nature.

Likewise such services can be used to spam indirectly – if I register on a site using your email address you’re going to get a unwanted (spam) message about registering on the site.

In the past that just meant the email would more likely be in your spam folder but more commonly now email providers take steps to stop this at the network level, and there are even coordinated efforts to block some servers from sendmail mail (blacklists). Obviously Verrotech work hard to keep our systems off such blacklists and as such don’t support or allow the bulk/common sending of unauthenticated email from our hosting servers (sending of mail is what our mail servers are for!). We don’t say no totally because it’s always possible you may want to send a couple of legitimate messages.

However – customers using applications that send mail on a regular basis should really configure these to send mail through an SMTP relay host, be that Verrotech’s mail servers if you have mail support or, more likely, a third party such as gMail. There are plenty of guides available online on how to do so.

Using an SMTP relay will not only mean your mails get through and don’t fall foul of our protections, but also they are more likely to appear in your users inboxes and not get categorised as spam.

Any problems with this feel free to contact support.