We currently have about 60 vendors we would like to email to send out letters with a word document or PDF attachments that we could email monthly or bi-weekly depending on the situation. We are running MS Exchange 03, but Exchange does not have a listserv management feature. I'm looking for advice on setting up a third party listserv to accomplish this. This is not SPAM, however I'm worried if we send this bulk email through the Exchange Server our Exchange Server's IP could get black listed. My thoughts are setting up a dedicated box to run the listserv. I've looked at applications such as hMailserver, listservfree, or sympa.org. I'm still unclear what application to use. Any suggestions? I'm also confused about how to properly set this up in regards to the DNS settings. My thoughts were to add an A record on my domain such as listserv.domain.com that points to an external IP that my firewall redirects to the private IP of my listserv box. I could then have my ISP setup a reverse DNS entry for listserv.domain.com on the external IP address I point it to. Can anyone provide any feedback on this topic?
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Setting up a ListServ
- Thread starter magicrjm
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I have to say that I would think twice before going down this road - mail's simply too important to risk getting blacklisted or blocked.
Have you thought about something like VerticalResponse or Shortburst ? Although both are subscription based, they're pretty cheap, you can manage your lists very well and best of all it doesn't put your mail system at risk or use valuable bandwidth.
It's easy to use as well - no specific technical skill required.
Another thought might be using mail just to send links to a CMS website page for example..fairly simple to set up, reasonably cheap if you use Drupal or something like, and again can be updated by non technical people.
Not really an answer to your question but a couple of options.
Have you thought about something like VerticalResponse or Shortburst ? Although both are subscription based, they're pretty cheap, you can manage your lists very well and best of all it doesn't put your mail system at risk or use valuable bandwidth.
It's easy to use as well - no specific technical skill required.
Another thought might be using mail just to send links to a CMS website page for example..fairly simple to set up, reasonably cheap if you use Drupal or something like, and again can be updated by non technical people.
Not really an answer to your question but a couple of options.
- Thread starter
- #3
My company has a backup internet line from a local satellite ISP. The internet line came with 5 static IP Addresses. There is absolutely no computers on this network. What I did was set up a computer with a static IP Address from the backup ISP and installed hMailServer on the workstation. The hMail server is running with a Domain that is not registered. I'm using domain.local right now. I did a test send to yahoo.com, gmail.com, comcast.net, and my company email address. Yahoo and My Company email received the email but moved it to the junk email folder. Comcast blocked the email with a rejection message telling me I'm SPAM and gmail took the email no problem. So to fix this problem and let the email server out there know that I'm not SPAM I think I need to have some DNS setup properly. Such as, create a sub domain listserv.domain.com and add the FQDN to my hMailServer and contact my ISP and see if they will add a reverse DNS entry for the IP Address I'm using. Your thoughts and comments are appreciated!
- Thread starter
- #4
Also, My Exchange Server is mail.companyname.com on a separate ISP from the hMailServer. If I have the A record listserv.companyname.com that is pointing to a different ISP IP Address do I still need to worry about blacklisting of my Exchange Server b/c the Exchange Server is using the same primary domain name?
It should be left for just that. If that connection gets blacklisted, and you're forced to use it as a backup, you're out of luck.
Pat Richard MVP
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