Hosting Mail At Google

[ak732]

I have news on the bounce backs, our server team has come up with a configuration for our gateway servers that will allow us to handle the issue plus deliver valid bounce backs to your mail box. We have been testing this configuration on one of our gateways for the last 2 weeks and we will be rolling the new config out to all servers over the next week. We plan to have all servers setup on the new config by next Friday. This will get rid of the no bounced messages issue.

That makes my day - maybe even my week.  Thanks for the great news, Ryan.

[brianc]

wow....  ak can you ask for some of the things I want 

[ak732]

wow....  ak can you ask for some of the things I want 

Sure I can ask, but I don't think I'll have any more success than you. 

The bounce-issue is one that many, if not not most people would define as a must-have for robust email support in virtually any sort of business or organization.  The other things you mentioned wanting are also important to lots of folks, but perhaps not quite as universally defined as "must-have". 

I would guess that being able to purchase additional email space will eventually happen if for no other reason than it could provide CT with another revenue channel.  I have no idea how much work it takes to implement though and I suspect that implementing stuff like that is always much harder in practice than it seems in theory. 

The free mailing list thing is kind of a marketing thing.  Maybe after analysis, CT might determine that selling additional email space and giving away free mailing list capability is a profitable trade-off.  But I'm not sure why they would give up having two revenue channels unless there is a market-driven reason (like CT determines that they have to do so to remain competitive).  Frankly, I have no idea how mailing list functionality is handled in other hosting companies.  I don't care about mailing list functionality because I can handle that stuff myself through a database and some simple programming/scripting.

I'm not up to speed on the problem involving alias forwarding; I've no idea what the problem is.  Guess I haven't run into it yet?

[Ben Amada]

If you use GMail, and have a web application on Crystaltech web server, you wouldn't be able to programatically send email from the web ap would you??? How could that work?

You can send mail via SMTP through Google

I was wondering about that ... so GMail does offer SMTP relay to be able to send email not using their web interface?  Sending email through a regular email client (Outlook, Thunderbird etc) is possible?

[MorningZ]

Ben:

Client Setup

by code (C# example, but applies to any language)

[Ben Amada]

Ben:

Client Setup

by code (C# example, but applies to any language)

Thanks for that 

I also just now ran across similar information in Google's help center.  All these documents mention using ports 465 or 587, Google's SMTP port.  This should work well in email clients, but I'm wondering if it may not work from a shared server at CT if using System.Net.Mail on a medium trust server.  I ran into this problem before and Rick Strahl mentions it in a recent blog post ... where you get a security exception if sending email out from a port other than 25.

[Ben Amada]

I gave SMTP relay to Gmail a test through a shared website at CT.  Sure enough, setting either ports 465 or 587 ended up with this exception:

Description: The application attempted to perform an operation not allowed by the security policy.  To grant this application the required permission please contact your system administrator or change the application's trust level in the configuration file.

Exception Details: System.Security.SecurityException: Request for the permission of type 'System.Net.Mail.SmtpPermission, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089' failed.

So, I tried not setting any port.  This ended up with an error (probably from Google) stating that SSL must be enabled.  So I set the "EnableSsl" property of the SmtpClient object to True and it went through, no errors.  In a nutshell, it worked when:

1. Setting the "EnableSsl" property to True.
2. Not specifying a port.
3. Setting NetworkCredential for SMTP authentication.