How to send mass emails legally through your own SMTP servers without being black listed?

Check out this thread I answered the other day, and let me know if you have any further questions/concerns.

https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/27361600/Mass-Emails.html?cid=1131&anchorAnswerId=36815989#a36815989

Papertrip,

Thanks. I have not found that question before. I wonder what do you do if you get flagged as spam. Emails we will be sending are unique per user and there is an option to unsubscribe. The contents are also clean marketing contents which is also OK.

So, how do you flag yourself out and how long does that take just in case.

I am planning to use Sendmail as the SMTP servers and have a few of those, like 2 or 3 each with its unique IP and host name. Is that what you meant on that?

If you follow all of my instructions, you should not get flagged as spam.  Of course that all depends on the receiving servers policies, and if there is one thing that rings true in the mail world, it's that you can't fix all the stupid.  You could have 100% totally legit mails that nobody except for 1 company sends to the spam folder.  When that is the case, the only thing you can do is reach out to that company and setup some policies for your domain(s).

I am planning to use Sendmail as the SMTP servers and have a few of those, like 2 or 3 each with its unique IP and host name. Is that what you meant on that?

Can you be more specific about what you are referring to?  Happy to help.

Papertrip,

There will be 3 Linux box with sendmail. One is for our internal emails with imap and pop access. The other 2 are two sendmail boxes just to send emails.

Hence, on the DNS records shall I add those two boxes with less priority MX records too? What is the best trick on the DNS records for those?

Thanks.

Papertrip,

So on Sendmail I would then have to create only accounts on the main one, right? The other 2 which are marketing, have no accounts but an alias or virtualuser table to forward those. How can I make sure that emails will not be delivered to the other 2 servers other than the main internal one? The MX records can have their priorities chaged as to the number you assign to them. As for Sendmail only the internal would have dovecot service running as the other two are SMTP sendmail only. I wonder if you would have a sample of such configuration. Thanks.

I don't have a sample sendmail config off hand, but there is lots of info out there for what you need to do.

You need to add the 2 new boxes as equal priority MX records and remove any others.
Configure sendmail on those 2 boxes to relay all mail for your domain to the main sendmail server.  You can probably just configure sendmail on those boxes to deliver to a "Smart Host" which would be the internal machine.  No accounts or aliases or virtualusers should be needed, you will be strictly relaying mail to the final destination, nothing more.

So do some research on sendmail as a relay, and using smart hosts in sendmail, etc.  It's pretty straight forward and should only be a few config changes at most.  I would setup the internal server to only accept mail from the 2 new boxes, but that is up to you and can be done once you get overall delivery/sending working.

Once you start reading some links on what needs to be done, I can double check any config changes you plan on making if you want, but I think you will be able to figure it out yourself :)  Either way let me know how it works out or if you have any more questions.