Octeth

1. Qmail is a specialist product with a lot of drawbacks in general use.
2. Qmail requires a very substantial amount of work, configuration and commitment by server administrators/technicians.
3. Postfix is very flexible and easier to install, configure, and maintain when compared to qmail.
4. For small list owners (100-25,000 subscribers) who just wish to use Oempro for their personal web-site’s, then just about any MTA (sendmail, exim, qmail, or postfix) will work just fine for your needs. Even in “most” shared hosting environments your Oempro will function as it should with small-medium sized lists.
5. One of the most important things you can do is make sure that bounce handling is setup correctly for your Oempro software. It is imperative that your bounces are being handled properly so that the mail server does not get flooded with invalid/bounced email addresses.
6. What happens is that when emails get pushed from Oempro to the mail server, the mail server will then proceed to deliver those messages. When an email gets returned/bounced, the script will handle it appropriately if your bounce handling is indeed configured correctly. If you do not have bounce handling configured, then that email will sit in the MTA mail queue and continue to try to resend it over and over and over. Eventually with larger lists you will fill your mail queue, and your server performance will start to decrease, and most likely your mail as well as your Oempro script will slow down to a snail’s speed. Ultimately you would then have to clear your mail queue to get things back up to par. You should not have to manually clear your mail queue, as if you have bounce handling setup correctly, the script will purge these email addresses from the mail queue, and remove the subscribers from your email list. This is nice, so that in the future you will have less bounces, since the script handles these with each new blast.
7. Then you have deferred messages (yahoo’s favorite disciplinary action for mass email senders). Yahoo will sometimes put your email in a que for 2 hours, or up to around 7 days! We usually configure the “retry delivery attempt time” for our own mail servers to around 4 hours. If the email has not been delivered by that time, then it gets sent to the script for bounce handling.
8. Setting up white-lists with Yahoo, and loopbacks with AOL is always a sound choice.
9. Setting up SPF records if you are ONLY doing mailing on your server is another good move, as AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc…all look at this as friendly.
10. Something else that is very important is if you plan on sending email campaigns on a large scale, then YOU MUST go with a dedicated server. Sorry, but a truly dedicated server is the way to go…not a VPS, Shared Environment, Reseller Environment, etc…DEDICATED is the only true way to ensure email delivery success on a LARGE scale.
11. Furthermore, if you choose to go the dedicated server route, please do not shop by price. Yes, you can find dedicated servers out there fairly reasonable, but what are you really purchasing? If you go cheap, then expect nothing but headaches, wasted time, and wasted money. If you do not have your own server administrator or contain server administration skills yourself, then you better look into a semi-managed dedicated server, or a fully managed dedicated server.

Information provided by Advantage 1 Webhosting

16th Aug 2007, Posted by Cem Hurturk under Newsletter Sending and Deliverability