For reasons some reasons I don’t entirely understand, and some that I do, I’ve been having SMTP server issues for awhile now.
The one I don’t entirely understand involves my hosting service, which provides SMTP services, but for some reason began blocking my server from connecting and sending email. I spent a couple of customer service sessions on the phone with them and wasn’t able to get any satisfying resolution. For some reason, my IP was blacklisted by them and I can’t appeal the IP’s, the owner of the IP’s have to. The problem is, I can’t get in touch with the owner of the IP’s because they don’t make any sense to me.
So I started using a different SMTP server (I have several emails accounts and thus have access to several of them). Unfortunately, the second one is not well administered and the SSL certificates for it recently expired, so I couldn’t connect to it.
I looked into ditching the whole ISP based SMTP server relationship and just setting up my mail server downstairs to use SMTP directly. The only problem is I don’t have a dedicated IP address. Rather, I have a DHCP issued one from my ISP and, while it can be stable for months at a time, it will change. Thus, my SMTP server would have a variable IP address and would cause problems with connecting to other email servers for mail delivery. Because of bulk-mailers and spammers, one of the first things email providers check for are dynamic IP addresses of SMTP servers, and they quickly block them.
I didn’t want to use Google or Yahoo because, well, I don’t particularly trust them. So that left me with one other option- finding a dedicated SMTP server service. Turns out, there are a number of them available and they each have their own take on services and pricing. They are all geared for bulk-emailing and marketing type emailing, but most have very low-cost plans that could suit a home need.
The big advantage for a home would be that, no matter where a person went, they could always connect to this SMTP service for email. I’ve actually already sort of done this- I just needed someone to help me send my emails reliably. After looking at services from the likes of mailjet, authsmtp, turbosmtp and several others, I opted to go with Easy-SMTP.
I went with their free service since it provides for 10,000 emails per month for an account and it plays nicely with my MTA, exim. It will also play nicely with just about any modern mail client. The other services either attached advertisements to emails or didn’t offer as much. Also, this one was clear about allowing multiple user email accounts to access the same account, which was a big deal since everyone’s mail would be using this server. I’m not saying the others don’t do that, it just wasn’t clear that they did. I was almost willing to pay for one of the services (less that $20 for a year for sending thousands of emails), but in the end easy-SMTP just seemed the best value.
The signup was extremely simple. I wish I could say I was up and running with it quickly, but I wasn’t. In this instance, I couldn’t blame easy-SMTP though. I had some latent configuration issues with my mail server setup which prevented it from working straight out of the box. I finally figured that issue out and my mail is once again working. Hopefully, easy-SMTP continues to as well.