Gustav Brock
Gustav at cactus.dk
Tue May 18 02:32:33 CDT 2010
Hi Darren In our experience, sending invoices as attached PDFs via e-mail is no different from sending any other e-mail. It will probably arrive at the receiver but you cannot be sure. Also, no outside service can change this as the uncertain element in the chain is the receiving mail server - if it thinks your e-mail is spam or if the receiving account is retracted, lacks storage space, or in any other way is out of service, your mail will either be lost or redirected to a postmaster or junk account where further delivery is by the mercy of the postmaster which quite often is imaginary. One of the precautions you can do is to send out mail via a trusted mail server. That may exclude your in-house server if you are on a dynamic network (typically ADSL for private users) which I guess you are not. Also, some receiving mail servers are sensitive to mail from a sender sent from someone else - like you do when a client's mail is sent from your mail server. This is not different for SendGrid and you could just as well use a free Google Apps account if you wish to use an outgoing SMTP server that is more likely not to be blacklisted anywhere than your in-house SMTP server. Other things you can do is to require to be whitelisted at receivers. This may, of course, be difficult if new receivers are added each month. Further, you could request that any receiver creates a dedicated account for you like invoice at receivingdomain.com.au or activebilling at receivingdomain.com.au and ask the postmaster to forward mail to at least two employees in charge. Finally, any decent SMTP server - including the simple SMTP service of any Windows server - is capable of creating logs, holding undeliverable mails, and returning error messages to sender for failed mail. You don't indicate your volume, but we have a client sending out hundreds of mails each month with quite large attached pictures, reports, or invoices using the SMTP-service running on an in-house Windows Server 2000 and a standard ADSL-line. This has run for two years with zero errors other than those at the receiving ends. I planned to move the logs to an ODBC-connection to their SQL Server but, given the low count of errors, we just browse the logs from time to time. The e-mails contains an replyto-address which is a live account at the sender which catches out-of-office messages and the like. /gustav >>> darren at activebilling.com.au 18-05-2010 06:45 >>> Hi Team As this is so way OT feel free to reply to Darren at activebilling dot com dot au Where I work we legitimately send emails on behalf of our clients to their clients We essentially produce invoices for our clients that are then on-sent to their clients So when it's invoice run time we send many emails with PDF attachments Our biggest problem is the reporting of Undeliverables due to Failed Sends, Bounces, Being Blacklisted, Being marked as a spammer, false positives etc etc I know this whole area is a mine field for spam and emails that just go missing etc etc, but what we want to investigate is "e-mail house" services. Something like Send grid. I thought I'd throw the question here first as I'm sure you blokes have dealt with this sort of stuff before So if anyone has an opinion on what tools and or services to subscribe to I'd love to hear from you Thanks in advance Darren