SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. It is the standard communication method for sending email over the Internet. This protocol allows email servers and clients to exchange messages securely and efficiently. It serves as the foundation of how emails are routed from sender to recipient. Without SMTP, email transmission as we know it wouldn’t […]
What is an SMTP Server?
The Best Free SMTP Servers
Looking to start your email campaign, but are on a budget? Below are some of the best free SMTP servers that allow you to send completely for free, and grow into your email budget. 1. MailerSend MailerSend is a standout free SMTP server thanks to its simplicity, robust features, and focus on providing value even […]
The Best SMTP Servers for Email Marketing
Dedicated SMTP servers help email marketers take control of their deliverability and email reputation. However, finding the right SMTP server with the pricing and features you need can be a challenge. Below are the top ten SMTP servers for email marketing we’ve found to be the best. The Best SMTP Servers for Email Marketing 1. […]
The Best SMTP Servers
Owning your own SMTP server can help improve your deliverability, sender reputation, and security. However, picking the right one can be challenging. Below are some of the best SMTP servers we’ve tested. The Best SMTP Servers 1. MailerSend MailerSend is a standout SMTP server choice because of its developer-friendly design and robust email infrastructure. With […]
Buying an SMTP Server? Here’s Everything You Need To Know
Whether you’re launching an email outreach campaign or managing a corporate email system, having your own SMTP gives you great flexibility and control over your deliverability and security. Below, we’ll break down everything you need to know when looking to buy an SMTP server and touch on some of the best solutions available today. What […]
The Best Email Encryption Services
Emails are one of the secure ways to communicate professionally. Yet, is it one hundred percent secure? No, at least not, unless and until you set up an email encryption system. There are high chances that any unauthorized person couldn’t access your mail without encryption. After all, you don’t want the whole world to see […]
The Best Email Security Software
Email is a common channel for cybercriminals to hack into a system because it was originally designed to be open and accessible to everyone. Of course, those were the nascent stages of the Internet when such sophisticated attacks were unheard of. But as the Internet grew, it became a popular vector for attacks as hackers […]
Business Email Security Best Practices
Email is the most popular and preferred channel for business communication today. It is estimated that about 63% of business professionals prefer to use emails for their business communication, and each employee sends an average of 40 emails per day for business purposes. But there’s also a downside to this widespread usage, and that’s unauthorized […]
Wadding up Spambots With Spiderkiller
Spiderkiller is a C program that will generate unique pages with random email addresses that will confuse harvesting bots. Compile the app: srv-5:~ usr4$ gcc spiderkiller.c -o spiderkiller spiderkiller.c: In function ‘main’: spiderkiller.c:299: warning: incompatible implicit declaration of built-in function ‘strlen’ The options are simple: srv-5:~ usr4$ ./spiderkiller -help Usage: spiderkiller [-help] [-n ] [-k […]
Tips on Running a Google Apps Pilot
When migrating from an internal email system to Google Apps, it’s nice to have the option of running a pilot program including a few of your users to try it out, and then to move the rest of the users over when problems with the transition have been identified and addressed. This is pretty easy […]
Rejecting Email Based on Headers With Postfix
Postfix has the ability to reject mail based on regular expression matching in the header of the incoming mail message. To enable this, add these lines to main.cf: header_checks = regexp:/etc/postfix/header_checks header_checks = pcre:/etc/postfix/header_checks We stuck these after the alias line. Add the header content matches and actions to header_checks (usually in /etc/postfix) and restart […]
Clearing Bad Messages Out of the Postfix Mail Queue
If you have bad messages in your Postfix mail queue, you can list them with the postqueue command: [root@svr-1 mail]# postqueue -p -Queue ID- –Size– —-Arrival Time—- -Sender/Recipient——- 4C63F2300BA 876 Mon Jun 5 09:31:54 user@somedomainsomewhere.com (connect to example.com[192.0.34.166]: Connection timed out) differentuser@example.com — 1 Kbytes in 1 Request. You will need the Queue Id to […]
Blue Security DDOS
There is an excellent discussion of the Blue Security DDOS attack here, including a copy of discussion from those behind the DDOS here. There is more information on Blue Frog and related issues on Wikipedia here. If you somehow missed this, it is probably in your best interest to be aware of what is going […]
Avoid Unwanted Email
The opportunists who send unsolicited bulk email (UBE) use tools that do not follow standards. This can work to an advantage in that improper configuration can allow quite a bit of filtering to be done on inbound email. For instance, the following entries in main.cf for postfix will dramatically cut down on email from misconfigured […]
Using UW IMAP and Xinetd For Dual SSL and Plaintext Support
First off, Pine rocks when it comes to reading mail quickly, particularly on a server where a GUI is not available. Second of all, it often doesn’t come with GNU/Linux distributions anymore. I suppose that part of the problem is that pine includes a version of IMAP that can cause problems if it coexists with […]
Postfix Source RPM Upgrade for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3
In this article, we upgraded Postfix to 2.2.5 via RPMs; however, if a later version is needed, and you are running Red Hat Enterprise Linux Version 3 (RHEL 3), an RPM needs to be created from source. There is a source RPM for 2.2.6 available here: http://postfix.wl0.org/ftp/official/2.2/SRPMS/ To use the RPM, install it: [root@s root]# […]
Postfix RPM Upgrade for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3
One of the servers we work on is running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 (RHEL 3). We needed some features in the later versions of Postfix, rather than the backported version for RHEL 3. There are some RPMs available here: http://postfix.wl0.org/ftp/official/2.2/RPMS-rhel3-i386 The latest version as of the date of this article is 2.2.5-3. If you […]
UNIX and Outlook Express Interoperability
The MIME on Outlook Express seems to be broken. We have seen several instances where Outlook Express users cannot read Email sent by UNIX Email clients. The message is garbled with lots of question marks and other random characters. We have had this problem here at netadmintools.com, since we use Linux Office Suite 99 for […]
Adding an Alias to Postfix
If you simply want to make a mailbox receive mail for another address, just add the full address to /etc/postfix/virtual: [root@srv-2 postfix]# cat virtual usr-1@networking.com usr usr-1@networking2.com usr usr-2@maildomain.com anotherusr If we simply add this line to the bottom: usr-3@maildomain.com anotherusr Mail that was was delivered previously via usr-2@maildomain.com will be delivered in the same […]
Setting Reply-to Address in Pine
We often need to mail brief messages from servers to send config files, or quick messages to other sysadmins. Pine works well for this, and the installation is mostly a single binary. We usually are logged in on some account that isn’t the email address we wish replies to come to. It turns out that […]
