PostCast SMTP Server

[Mauldor]

As mail took a few days to arrive to various people i searched for a solotuion to take NTL out of the loop in regards EMail.

Now i bought websapce / email from UH-Hosting for £22 (not advertising - just saying) but that does not include the Outgoing mail side only incoming (Asp Pro package anyhow).

But i found a free program that basically acts as a SMTP server so mails go direct from your PC to them rather than NTl SMTP Server:

http://www.postcastserver.com/

Might be worth a look, as i say its free and seems to work well.

Hope this is of some use to anybody...

[philip.j.fry]

Using your own smtp server can be a good solution to NTLs appalling server. Just make sure that you either configure the program to only accept connections from your pc or have a firewall installed, this'll stop people from using your machine to spam.

Postcastserver does work well - I used it for a while before setting up my own SMTP server.

[Matth]

The problem with using your own server, is that you are likely to find addresses which blacklist known "customer IP" address range as a contermeasure against spammers using their own, or other people's, PC based SMTP senders.

[gkhewitt]

As Matth said there are problems involved.

I run Postfix on my home server and recently found the other day that I had nearly 20 emails in a queue going to the aol.com domain, since AOL deny all SMTP conversations from Dynamic IPs such as NTL's.

Solution was to configure the server to forward the email via smtp.ntlworld.com if the first tries failed.

Good luck

As I recall PCS has a fallback option that will allow it to use NTL's SMTP if it cannot send the mail direct.

[Stuartbe]

Originally Posted by pem

As I recall PCS has a fallback option that will allow it to use NTL's SMTP if it cannot send the mail direct.

Surely that would only work if the destination server was not reachable, unles the mail server can read the " bounce " email that comes back. Even if it could there would still be a large delay as some smtp servers take there time in returning the mail.

I use no-ip's smtp relay service (as well as a few others) and it works perfectly for me.

One thing that I would stress as was stressed in the second post on this thread - Make sure you secure the mail server correctly - This is vital as there are allready plenty of insecure mail servers around.

Originally Posted by Stuartbe

Surely that would only work if the destination server was not reachable, unles the mail server can read the " bounce " email that comes back. Even if it could there would still be a large delay as some smtp servers take there time in returning the mail.

You get a SMTP error response code if the mail send is rejected - just like in http & ftp.

[Mauldor]

Well how i ran that perticular SMTP Server was behind firewall in the sense that only me on the local port can send - all i needed in effect was something running on my local machine that sent emails out - as incoming was fine in that respect.

I never went the full blown route of a email server, i only needed a soloution that would allow me to send mails from one machine. I have since ditched that program by the way as people on the other end seem to be getting 2-3 copies of each mail for some reason and im currently looking at other solutions.