Why implement the SMTP Relay?
A big part of communicating with your customers is based on trust. Sending an E-mail from your domain will make the chance the client trusts and reads it better.
A big part of communicating with your customers is based on trust. Sending an E-mail from your domain will make the chance the client trusts and reads it better.
What is a SMTP Relay?
For this we implemented the possibility to use a SMTP relay. The image below shows what an SMTP relay is.
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Instead of our SMTP server sending the email directly to your customers, the E-mail is relayed to your customers through your STMP server. You can choose any from address that your E-mail server has a mailbox for.
Instead of our SMTP server sending the email directly to your customers, the E-mail is relayed to your customers through your STMP server. You can choose any from address that your E-mail server has a mailbox for.
How to implement the SMTP Relay?
When you have configured white labeling in Webdashboard, you'll see the tab 'SMTP Relay'. When you click that it states that you need to contact Webdashboard to enable SMTP relay for you. We do this so we can make sure to let you know the following:
- When enabling this, all mails will go through your SMTP server, we can't monitor this anymore
- We work with basic SMTP authentication. This will access a mailbox by username/password. Don't use your own password, always use an app password used specifically for this purpose.
The SMTP server of Webdashboard needs trust from the SMTP relay server. We implemented this with basic authentication. So if you know you SMTP server name, port number and a username password that has access to that server, you are good to go. To give a bit more context, if you want to connect something like gmail.com. You can just go to their guide:
IMAP, POP, and SMTP | Gmail | Google for Developers
It states:
Incoming connections to the IMAP server at imap.gmail.com:993 and the POP server at pop.gmail.com:995 require SSL. The outgoing SMTP server, smtp.gmail.com, supports TLS. If your client begins with plain text, before issuing the STARTTLS command, use port 465 (for SSL), or port 587 (for TLS).
So for gmail we should use smtp.gmail.com with port 587.
As a username just use your email address, but you can’t use your regular password, you’ll need a app password. You can create one here:
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/185833?hl=en
Once the password is created, make sure to remove the space in between the 4 parts of the password shown, so you’ll have a password of 16 characters. Now you have everything you need to start sending e-mail from your own E-mail account.
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Now make sure you Enable the SMTP server, and press save. Now a green indicator is shown next to your smtp relay server name, it’s active now. All E-mails are now send through that relay.
You can test if everything works, by using the Test SMTP Relay functionality. It will send the message, but unfortunately not if it was send successfully. For this, go to Settings -> Stats & Audits and show the audits, then go to the E-mail tab.
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Here you’ll get an overview of all the mail that is send by Webdashboard and if it was successful. Make sure to disable your relay, when the sending isn’t successful, so mails are send through our servers again.
Mails are marked as Delivered, but are marked as spam by our customers?
Because of the nature of invitation E-mails and password E-mails, they might be flagged by your clients even if you mail from your own domain. A good way to find out if your E-mail server is in any way the reason this happens is to check with a tool if your email server is likely to be detected as ‘spammy’.
Webdashboard uses https://www.mail-tester.com on every mail we make available in Webdashboard. To make sure chances that E-mails are marked as spam are a low as possible. We are only satisfied with a 10/10 score. You can check the score for free the first couple of times, so just use the email address presented by the tool in the SMTP Relay Test functionality and you’ll get a score.
The SMTP server of Webdashboard needs trust from the SMTP relay server. We implemented this with basic authentication. So if you know you SMTP server name, port number and a username password that has access to that server, you are good to go. To give a bit more context, if you want to connect something like gmail.com. You can just go to their guide:
IMAP, POP, and SMTP | Gmail | Google for Developers
It states:
Incoming connections to the IMAP server at imap.gmail.com:993 and the POP server at pop.gmail.com:995 require SSL. The outgoing SMTP server, smtp.gmail.com, supports TLS. If your client begins with plain text, before issuing the STARTTLS command, use port 465 (for SSL), or port 587 (for TLS).
So for gmail we should use smtp.gmail.com with port 587.
As a username just use your email address, but you can’t use your regular password, you’ll need a app password. You can create one here:
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/185833?hl=en
Once the password is created, make sure to remove the space in between the 4 parts of the password shown, so you’ll have a password of 16 characters. Now you have everything you need to start sending e-mail from your own E-mail account.
Now make sure you Enable the SMTP server, and press save. Now a green indicator is shown next to your smtp relay server name, it’s active now. All E-mails are now send through that relay.
You can test if everything works, by using the Test SMTP Relay functionality. It will send the message, but unfortunately not if it was send successfully. For this, go to Settings -> Stats & Audits and show the audits, then go to the E-mail tab.
Here you’ll get an overview of all the mail that is send by Webdashboard and if it was successful. Make sure to disable your relay, when the sending isn’t successful, so mails are send through our servers again.
Mails are marked as Delivered, but are marked as spam by our customers?
Because of the nature of invitation E-mails and password E-mails, they might be flagged by your clients even if you mail from your own domain. A good way to find out if your E-mail server is in any way the reason this happens is to check with a tool if your email server is likely to be detected as ‘spammy’.
Webdashboard uses https://www.mail-tester.com on every mail we make available in Webdashboard. To make sure chances that E-mails are marked as spam are a low as possible. We are only satisfied with a 10/10 score. You can check the score for free the first couple of times, so just use the email address presented by the tool in the SMTP Relay Test functionality and you’ll get a score.