Hey folks,
At work we offer a subscription service and nightly send out 10s of
thousands of emails to paying customers. At present this is does via
a Kerio mail server which also doubles as our corporate mail server.
I'm in the process of setting up a Postfix box that will eventually
offload the bulk mail, leaving Kerio as our corporate server.
I've got a few comments and questions around this, and would
appreciate your feedback.
Note that we don't want the two mail servers being backup for each
other. The postfix bulk mailer should not really receive any
unsolicited mail. The only time it should be talking to other mail
servers is when it is delivering our nightly delivery. The mails we
send out have a "reply-to" address of "ale...@example.com" which
should go back to the Kerio server.
At this point what it looks like to me is that I should not set any MX
record to point to the Postfix server. What I've done so far is
assign it it's own IP and the name relay.example.com though I may
change that name to alerts.example.com. Doesn't really matter either
way for sake of this discussion. I've also included that in our SPF
record.
Does this sound right so far? No MX record for this guy?
Is there a preferred way to get it to not accept unsolicited
connections? Or does this matter? I guess nobody would have a reason
to start sending it mail anyway.
Should I configure it to know about the Kerio users, just in case?
And if so, can you point me at the appropriate readme for that? So it
can just forward to the other mail server.
Oh, one thing I should mention as well. We currently have a program I
wrote which combs the Kerio mail logs for rejects from the nightly
"alert run". This all gets logged into a database, and we have
another program that goes through the database and turns off emails
for people with a certain number of rejects. This is of course to
help prevent us from getting flagged as spammers. I assume that with
the above setup, that Postfix should keep a similar log and all I'll
have to do is tweak my program to account for the Postfix log format
(if there are differences from Kerio). Is this a safe assumption?
To rephrase this question - under the above configuration, is there
any reason to believe that rejects would somehow be recorded on our
Kerio server if it is the Postfix server sending them out? I can't
imagine how that would be the case since it is part of the handshake,
no? And happens right-on-the-spot while trying to deliver from my
end.
And finally, is there a recommended way to configure something like
this so we don't get flagged as spammers?
The only obvious setting I see is this one :
default_destination_concurrency_limit = 5
What else should I be doing?
Thanks very much in advance for all your help!
cheers,
-Alan
--
“Don't eat anything you've ever seen advertised on TV”
- Michael Pollan, author of "In Defense of Food"
