Thread: mail server questions

I am using some free webspace on a linux server for testing. It has sendmail installed and I am able to set up some mail headers and send out mails from my website. I presume that sendmail as its name suggests is only for sending and cannot be somehow configured to receive or can it?

How do I stop this mail from being flagged as junk or even stopped completely by spam filters. Any good tutorials?

I understand that my other option is to install a different 3rd party mail client on my server or use one on another remote server to deal with incoming and outgoing. Again does anyone have any good suggestions or tutorials?

Sorry if this sounds naiive but I have spoken to a few really good developers and they don't seem to know much about this topic either :s

Hiya,

I don't know about the sendmail program itself, but if it doesn't sent authenticated mail (using the email addresses mail server, username, and password), it'll quite often get flagged as spam or not delivered at all, i.e. using PHP's mail() function.

If you were to use the PHP PEAR Mail package, this can send emails using authentication just like your email client does, so that the recipient servers know you're the real sender.

Although it does take some configuring, and I'm not sure of any packages that come preinstalled with it how you need to use it.

Sorry if that wasn't overly helpful, but it might be a poke in the right direction!!

I used PHP PEAR recently for an eCard system and it was remarkably easy to set up. Installation is very simple as you just use the server's control panel to do it (although I was testing it on Windows - which was slightly more difficult to install on).

There were plenty of examples on how to use it (somewhere - I think in that link that stu provided), but I can look again or alternatively give you the code I used.

I was only sending emails though, not receiving them.

Sendmail can be configured to being a POP3 server as well as an SMTP server. Sendmail generally works off of the local user system. And originally sends all mail to a mail file in the user's home directory.

Changing these sort of things can be done two ways; A. configuration files B. Custom installation compilation.

Spam get's filtered by an abundance of ways. Ip filtering, domain filtering, header mal-formation, and many others. You could simply have your mail headers formatted wrong. Or your mail server's IP has been flagged due to someone misusing the server; often these misuses are from crackers who don't care, or people who just want to spam the hell out of everything and don't care lol.
It is even possible for your domain to have been put on a spamming list. If this is the case, and you or anyone else who has control over the domain has not been spamming people; likely you have been cracked.

Thanks both I will check out pear, looking forward to it and thanks for the spam info burn, look forward to catching up with you for the security consult once I get this code finished.