Re:Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative t...
by howard941 on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @12:14PM
(#14204319)
> manually approve every customer to ensure our entire CIDR ranges are clean
This is probably a key element of good performance. To keep my mail admin duties part time I simply whois the IP of evil senders and drop the resulting entire CIDR block into the our local blacklist.
Re:Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative t...
by cbhl on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @11:57AM
(#14204124)
Why wouldn't spammers just start adopting Postal on their servers, too?
Re:Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative t...
by jonknee on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @12:09PM
(#14204272)
Judging from the amount of it the sending email portion is not what spammers struggle with. It's the "maintain your own IP with a great reputation" part. How would Postal help?
Re:Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative t...
by oblib on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @04:43PM
(#14206791)
That's apparently a process that takes time, but in the long run it could easily pay off. Over the years I've dealt with "Verio" selling my ip address to spammers. Before that they had entire ranges of IP blocked that I got caught up in.
A couple years ago I did the work to use "Mandrill" in an app and they got merged with "MailChimp" who changed how my app could use their service and I had to redo those routines again.
Right now I'm using Mailgun and they're awesome.
Re:Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative t...
by msumpter on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @12:09PM
(#14204273)
Well from the install directions they recommend 8GB of memory for the server. A simpler SMTP server like Postfix or Exim can do with much fewer resources, and a spam operation doesn't care about abiding by protocol for redelivery attempts, they just fire and forget and mostly opt for direct SMTP delivery.
At the same time, if you are willing to install and manage Postal on your own servers, it's not that hard to maintain your own IP with a great reputation. You just need a good hosting provider (probably not AWS), you need to set up your infrastructure like DKIM, SPF, DMARC, rDNS, and Return Paths, and most importantly you need to maintain good engagement (low bounces, high opens). At a glance, Postal looks like a nice option if you want to do it on your own for cheap. You just might lack the stability, support, maintenance, and performance that goes behind an ESP.