email – Verrotech Help

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)

One way of avoiding your sent messages being put into spam folders is by “signing” your messages as being genuinely from your domain (not just sent by a random stranger) using a mechanism called DKIM.

There are two elements to DKIM – a record held with your domain records and a signature put into a message. When a message is received supposedly from your domain containing a signature this is validated against the actual record held by your domain. DKIM is a powerful mechanism to ensure messages are genuine but requires some setup and careful management especially if you have complicated email setups.

Currently Verrotech are offering DKIM on a trial basis with limited support to customers. To qualify for the trial DKIM service you must:

Have Verrotech manage the DNS for your domain (if you don’t know what this is, then don’t worry – we do!)
Send messages through Verrotech directly (i.e. not have your email hosted on Google or Office 365 or another provider)
Do not take part in bulk mailing or marketing emails (though we will be trialling per-domain DKIM for such users)

If you meet the above criteria and would like to try DKIM (maybe you’re having more mail go into spam) then contact support.

Sender Policy Framework (SPF)

The Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is a way to try and combat junk (spam) email on the Internet by defining who is allowed to send mail on behalf of a domain.

If you have a domain hosted with Verrotech you may want to use SPF in one of two ways.

1 – Use a Third-Party Email Provider (gSuite, Office 365, etc)

If you use a third-party email provider to send and receive your email then we can configure your domain to make them a “trusted sender”. You can find the settings yourself and let us know, or just tell us which provider you’re with. Either way just contact support.

2 – Use Verrotech to Send and Receive Email

If you use the Verrotech mail system to send mail then we may have already configured SPF. If you’re not sure or need to ensure it’s enabled then contact support.

Note: If you send through Verrotech but we don’t manage your domain (the DNS) then you’ll need to add Verrotech to any SPF record you have. You can do this by including _spf.verrotech.com in your SPF directive.

Don’t Forget…

You may well actually send mail from a few different places – do you for example use MailChimp or a similar bulk sending service? Have a website form that sends mail or a notification system? Ideally all these will be listed in the SPF.

Mailing from Hosting Servers

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.

Domain email settings

If Verrotech host your domain then you’ll need the settings below to connect your mail client to your account. These settings should work with pretty much any mail client – if not get in touch and we can do a specific guide for yours.

Please note as of July 2016: Verrotech ask all our customers to use secure (SSL) connections. Old configurations will continue to work only for the time being!

For these to work you need your EMAILUSERNAME and EMAILPASSWORD (these are specific for each email address you have and often in the form domain-name e.g. hello@example.com would probably be example-hello).

Note depending on your mail client not all the settings below should be asked for – but all clients will work with Verrotech, just fill in what you can and test it.

Incoming Settings

Type of server: IMAP (we strongly recommend you use IMAP, but we also support POP)
Server: mail.verrotech.com
Use SSL to connect (this may be called use secure connection or similar, and ensures your connection is safe and encrypted)
Port: 993 (for IMAP secure this is 993, if you’re using secure POP it’s 995. If you are not using SSL connections [unsecure and not recommended!] the ports are 143 for IMAP and 110 for POP)
Username: EMAILUSERNAME
Password: EMAILPASSWORD

Outgoing Settings

Outgoing is a standard called SMTP (so no need to worry which one to choose!)

Server: mail.verrotech.com
Use authentication: yes (note you may be able to check “use the same credentials as incoming server” here to avoid putting the username and password in twice)
Use SSL to connect (this may be called use secure connection or similar)
Port: 465 (if you’re not using SSL this would be 587, but please use SSL!)
Username: EMAILUSERNAME
Password: EMAILPASSWORD

Sending domain mail from gMail

In order to send mail from gMail as another domain (one hosted with Verrotech) you need to configure some options.

For this you will need your email username and password (the ones used for accessing your email account, not the file upload ones).

Let’s assume your Verrotech-hosted email is hello@example.com and your username is MAILUSERNAME with password MAILPASSWORD.

The settings for gMail outgoing mail would be:

SMTP Server: mail.verrotech.com
Port: 587
Check: Use TLS Encryption
Username: MAILUSERNAME
Password: MAILPASSWORD