I have signed up with Google Apps, I am using a third party SMTP Server to send the emails from the web app, Emails are reaching inbox for all the email clients (yahoo, gmail, hotmail...)
But Emails sent to my domain (mydomain.com) are reaching SPAM, This is happening only for my domain Which is google apps account domain. The solution to the problem is the sender must be in the contacts of the receiver. So its a overhead involved in adding the sender in the contacts before receiving the mail. This is not automated.
NOTE: Mails sent from <xyz#mydomain.com> to <abc#mydomain.com> are reaching SPAM. It means, Its happening only when the sender and receiver belongs to same domain.
ASSUMPTION: ALL the emails will be sent from mydomain.com .
So, I want to write a script using google apps script So that when a mail arrives from mydomain.com (having FROM address belongs to mydomain.com), The script must execute and add the senders emails address in the contacts. So it will avoid the spam rate.
I am very new to google apps script, Please help me doing this, Or if any better solution is there please feel free to post.
Vinay,
It sounds like you may have an incorrectly configured SPF record. Please see this article:
https://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33786&topic=2759192&ctx=topic
Email that has a mydomain.com sender address, needs to come from a mail server listed in your SPF record or risk being sent to spam.
By chance, has Contact Sharing been enabled for your apps domain? I'm just offering this as an hunch that might help rather than a specific solution to your problem.
If this doesn't help, its a straightforward but non-trivial problem to add all your domain accounts to each others contacts list (and keeping it synced over time), but you'll be leaning heavily on a version of the Contacts API rather than plain Apps Script because the Contacts service only operates on the contacts of the user executing your script.
Related
I don't have any technical problems, but I have a question that I would like to be answered out of curiosity.
Here is my current understanding of how email works:
One of the privileges of having your own domain is that you can hook it up to IMAP/POP3/SMTP servers and use them to send and receive messages to and from "anyone#yourdomain.com". With spam being such a problem, however, the SMTP server that you use to send messages must add a bunch of headers (DKIM, SPF, etc) to each message that you send in order to prove that the SMTP server has the authority to send emails from that domain. The receiving SMTP server can cross-check those headers with DNS records that it finds to verify the legitimacy of the email message.
So if you want to send emails with your domain cheaply, you can use Gmail's "Send Mail As" feature. I followed this help article to get mine working: https://support.google.com/domains/answer/9437157
Note: I unchecked the "Treat as an alias" option during the setup.
But wait... no additional DNS configuration required? I have my domain registered with Cloudflare, and there are no entries related to Google in there.
There is this step in the setup process:
But it seems that this only for Google to prevent you from using their servers to send spam. What is stopping Google from impersonating any email address they want? Why do receiving SMTP servers trust an email from "anyone#yourdomain.com" if Google's SMTP servers have no way of adding legitimate SPF/DKIM headers?
The short answer is that nothing prevents Google from doing this, and that DMARC was created for exactly this case.
There is nothing that stops Google from impersonating any domain. However, there are things receivers can (and should) do when they receive an email which isn't send from the server indicated in the From: field.
Try sending an email from the alias you just added to a different #gmail.com inbox. You will see that it says via gmail.com behind the sender email address. But other email receivers might do more: flag this message with red exclamation marks and scam warnings, throw it into spam or even deny receiving it completely. Gmail probably has some hardcoded trust, but try doing this from your own SMTP server and the above will very likely happen.
As you say in your question, you can authorize your emails by marking gmail.com as an authorized sender with SPF (which protects against forging from other domains, but doesn't stop Google), or even sign your emails with DKIM (not possible from Gmail UI, but you can do this in some email clients or send email with a custom Python script like me; Google can't do this without knowing the key).
However, that only solves one side of the problem – authorizing legitimate email messages. But what if an SMTP server still receives an unverified email? What if they have previously received an email from the same sender which was DKIM signed? What if DKIM passes, but SPF fails?
Because the behavior in that case is largely unspecified, and also the sender wants to check if their DKIM/SPF authorizations are actually working, and if anyone is attempting to spoof them, another standard was created: DMARC. It introduces another DNS TXT record where you can say what checks are required to pass, what to do if they fail, and also what basic analytics should the receivers report to the owner of the domain.
Of all webmail client providers, Google's Send mail as is actually the most well-implemented for a variety of reasons.
First of all, how it works is not different from when you set up POP3 or IMAP using a mail client like Outlook or Thunderbird. You have to specify the domain and port where you receive emails from, and the domain and port where you send emails from. For example, Google's incoming and outgoing servers for IMAP are as follows:
imap.gmail.com:993
smtp.gmail.com:465
The Send mail as feature is a partial implementation of that. It only implements the outgoing part.
How mail clients like Outlook and Thunderbird send emails, is basically that it sends the email to the outgoing mail server, and the outgoing mail server then sends the email. Usually, outgoing mail servers will require some sort of authentication, and will allow authenticated users to only send from specific email addresses.
Gmail works the same way. The outgoing mail server is the one that has to pass the SPF and DKIM tests, not Google's servers.
No other webmail clients do this. Hotmail used to do this, but they recently removed the feature. Now, the option is very difficult to find, and they just rewrite your FROM address and sends your email from Hotmail's SMTP server, which creates delivery problems.
They don't provide you with the option to send emails from another SMTP server, because this allows people to very easily set up virtual mail servers that can send emails under a domain of your choice, but use say a typical free Hotmail account to store incoming mails. This takes away business from their paid services, because both Hotmail and Gmail sell the option to host your company emails. I'm sure Google also knows about this, but it is really awesome of them to still keep the option available to free Gmail users.
If you want to learn more about virtual email servers, you can check out this article here: https://blog.terresquall.com/2022/01/setting-up-a-virtual-postfix-mail-server-part-1/
Currently the small business I work for has a support email address setup as the following: support#mybusinessdomain.com (changed domain for anonymity).
We need to make it so that multiple people can manage this email address, and the way we have it currently setup is causing some issues.
The way it is currently setup is that all emails are forwarded to myself and three other coworkers that manage the support emails that come in, and each of us have setup the following rule:
"Do this: Skip Inbox, Apply label "BusinessDomain Support", Never send it to Spam"
So we get all of the emails sent to that label, they skip our inbox and we delegate/respond from there. This was causing issues with my coworkers responding to the same emails and has our customers replying to our actual work email addresses rather than the support email.
We setup a process/procedure to make sure my coworkers and I were only answering things once, and to solve the problem of customers responding to the wrong email address we added the support#mybusinessdomain.com email as a "Send mail as" for each of us. However, now we are all sending emails from the same email address and it is a bit confusing as to who responded AND all sent emails are showing in our sent folder.
So, what is the best way to setup this support email so that multiple people can manage it and so that customers that reply to emails sent are always sent to support#mybusinessdomain.com?
Any help would be great!!
You need to use a group as a collaborative inbox.
Collaborative inboxes are especially useful for technical support or
customer service teams. For example, you could create a group with the
address support#your-domain.com. You could then add your
support staff as group members, and allow people outside your
organization to send messages to the group. Your support staff would
then receive customer messages and take any of the following actions:
Assign responsibility for topics to group members
Mark topics as resolved
Edit tags associated with topics
Filter topics according to tag, resolution status, or assignee
I got a domain registered with GoDaddy recently. Also, I purchased their Professional email & paid for a year's service.
After purchasing my Hosting server I got a Cpanel Account. Digging into the various CPanel options, I came across the CPanel emails section which lets you create multiple mail accounts for your Domain. My question is, did I waste my money not knowing that CPanel offered me a facility to create Business emails? Should I start using CPanel mails & disown the GoDaddy pro mail service.
Also, CPanel offers to configure mail clients of your choice for mobile & desktop which sounds convenient & offers the same solution as my GoDaddy pro email offers.
It depends on how many emails you send out and if they are important (should reach recipient's inbox folder).
You don't mention how familiar you are with setting up email servers, however if you set up a new email server, on a new domain, there is a higher chance that your email will end up in recipient's spam folder, especially if your email server isn't configured right, and you send out a lot of emails.
The service you bought increase chances that email sent out from GoDaddy's email servers will end up in inbox instead of spam folder, because GoDaddy (should) have email servers with good reputation.
To answer your question, if you know how to configure the email server the right way, you could send out emails on your own, just like GoDaddy does, and save some money.
You can use cPanel based web hosting for your business email. You can setup your Email apps (like android default email with this). Before setting up, you must add DKIM, SPF and DMARC records within DNS of related domain, that will help you to mark your emails as not spam.
I want to use node-mailer module to send emails to registering users on app for verification and other purposes also. I am not sure which transport mechanism to use so that emails I send are not a spam and also get delivered.
I also want to use the same domain to receive emails regarding support and bugs(i.e lets say on email on support#example.com). I am planning to set-up google apps account for this. Basically I will set-up the google apps account with me being an user and having an alias support#example.com. So can I also set-up an alias with say admin#example.com and send the emails using nodemailer from my app using this email address? But obviously I don't want to store my email id and password for google apps in the code for security reasons. So how Should I do it?
Other option is to Amazon SES, I believe its a good service and would be very useful. But can I use the same domain name for serving email from AMAZON SES and google apps also being able to host my app? So how to send emails from AMAZON SES by authenticating SPF and DKIM so that these emails reach the inbox of the user.
Saransh,
You absolutely can use the same domain and email address with both Google Apps and AmazonSES without any issues. When it comes to receiving emails, all messages have to be directed to a single server (your MX records). But sending email is very different in that you can send email from many different sources without any issues.
To ensure your messages don't go to the SPAM folder just be sure to properly authenticate all your messages with SPF and DKIM. I'm not sure how this works with AmazonSES, but it was really easy with the provider that I chose for my email http://socketlabs.com
I'm working on a web-based application, and looking to integrate each user's e-mail (gmail, yahoo, etc.) into it. I'd like to do an automatic sync (side detail: selective to specific e-mail addresses) of inbox and sent messages, i.e. any messages sent through the application will appear in the user's e-mail, and vice versa; any messages received in the application will appear in the e-mail, and vice versa.
My question: I realize this will probably involve IMAP. Is there a way to go about this without storing the user's e-mail passwords? I'm open to any language, infrastructure, etc.
If there's really no way around storing the passwords, would MD5 be sufficient? Any other thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
you would need to find an OAuth-based API for accessing the email provider. this would allow the user to authenticate themself, provide you with an access token for later use.
I believe you can do this with Gmail, Yahoo (see links)
A situation where this might arise is a private messaging system on a forum. A user might want PMs forwarded to their main email so that they don't have to remember to check the inbox on your site as well as their main email. Then when users reply to those messages, you want the reply to go as a PM to another forum user.
Forwarding PMs as emails is trivial. In order to allow replies, you need to have the email server on your site parse out some information in the email that indicates which user it should be forwarded to as a PM.
If you really want to allow a user to access their entire GMail inbox from within the interface on your site, rather than just messages that went through your site anyway, then you are facing a much larger task.