[PLUG] email best practices

chris (fool) mccraw gently at gmail.com
Wed Jun 18 16:53:24 UTC 2008


hey folks,

i'm coming from a 12-year background of using sendmail to handle mail
for single domains which have always been trivial to administer:  the
domain name is valid, entirely managed by me, is hosted on the IP from
which mail comes, and that IP resolves to the domain in question.

in my new job, we are hosting many domains on a single machine (and
IP), so the reverse resolution is no longer correct.  our web apps
need to send mail (largely receipts for purchases) from domain.com
when we do not control or host domain.com--clients just have
www.theirdomain.com pointing to our server, and often lack expertise
to run a mailserver that will route mail from us appropriately (and we
don't want to get into the business of managing their mailserver).

so my question is;

what's the best practice for sending mail from a machine which does
not match up DNSwise with the necessary sending (From: address)
domain?  obviously, we could just spoof it, and eventually get
blacklisted or at least dropped into spamboxes.  we'd like to avoid
that =)

i am open to all kinds of solutions, but unfortunately, sending from
ourdomain.com is right out, since the clients wish to appear to be
doing everything on their own.  we can do things like get the domain
owner to set up SPF records.

i am willing to do research, i'm just not sure what to research.
could you point me in the right direction?



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