Customers often ask “what are the best configurations to use with PowerMTA”?  The answer is different for every region of the world. Configuration settings in the US will be vastly different than those in Europe for example, so global settings are not as effective. In this blog post, we take a look at five essential PowerMTA™ configuration tips that will help make your sending infrastructure more efficient and reduce I/O clutter.

Memanfaatkan arahan sumber untuk memastikan header email Anda benar

ESPs and many high volume senders send email on behalf of other organizations and often feel they do not have full control over the email headers.   This is not the case, and if best practices are not followed, email almost inherently will end up being routed ke junk folder. With PowerMTA™, you can add missing data or Message-ID headers.  You can also hide internal sources in the “received header,” or completely disable adding the received header altogether. The latter is often used to make it look as if the email originated from the sender’s public IP.

Jaga konfigurasi yang bersih dengan menggunakan pewarisan parameter secara lebih bijak

For manageability configurations, it is important to keep them DRY. DRY stands for Don’t Repeat Yourself, and, is an acronym used by software developers.  For example, PowerMTA™ merges the settings from all matching sources. Thus you can often move common settings ke source 0/0 that matches every IP that connects to PowerMTA™. Except for “always-allow-relaying” of course, which should only be allowed from specific sources. You can also remove settings with obvious default values and further reduce redundant configurations.

With domain directives, all matching domain entries are merged, giving preference to more specific entries, regardless of the order in the configuration. By using sensible default settings for the wildcard domain, you can reduce the configuration to only a few exceptions.  For example, the following setting eliminates the need to enable the use of TLS on “many” specific domains:

<domain *>     use-starttls yes # Use TLS when delivering email </domain>

Jangan buang sumber daya untuk domain email yang tidak valid

Jika bagian lokal dari alamat email tidak ada, Anda biasanya akan mendapatkan pesan kesalahan dari ISP. Namun, jika domain tidak valid, Anda mungkin mengalami kesalahan berulang seperti pencarian DNS yang gagal, server yang tidak responsif, atau server yang menolak untuk merelay dari domain tertentu.

PowerMTA™ should be configured not to waste resources on these domains, and focus delivery of resources to valid domains. You can instruct PowerMTA to bounce email if an MX record could not be found for a domain since invalid domains caused by typos often have an “A “record without a proper “MX” mail server record in DNS. You can also use a domain macro combined with black-holing to drop mail known for discontinued domains or domains with anonymous discardable accounts.  In any event, the goal is to keep the configuration “lean” for invalid or less important domains.

Menerapkan pengaturan berdasarkan data dan pengalaman Anda sendiri

We’ve talked about this before, but I’d like to reiterate here.  PowerMTA™ has a long list of configuration directives that you can use straight out of the box. Directly copying settings from other sources or matching configurations from another sender environment is not useful, since you might end up with redundant configurations, or even applying settings that are not applicable in your sending environment. The best approach is to keep it as simple as possible and add settings that you understand, and are appropriate in your “own” environment.

Senders in the US require a different configuration than senders in Europe. Furthermore, the settings often depend on the volume of mail, the type of email, and the reputation of the sending IPs.  You can use data from PowerMTA’s accounting files to determine what are the most important domains in your case. By looking di bounce reports, you can determine which errors should trigger the back-off mode for example.

Mencatat kesalahan sementara untuk memantau pelambatan oleh ISP

Log akuntansi PowerMTA™ sering digunakan untuk mencatat pengiriman atau pantulan. Tetapi dengan mengaktifkan pencatatan kesalahan sementara, Anda bisa mendapatkan banyak informasi tentang pengiriman, dan cara mengoptimalkannya. Penyedia webmail besar, tetapi juga ISP yang lebih kecil, memiliki batasan jumlah pesan yang mereka terima dari IP tertentu. Ketika batas tersebut tercapai, mereka akan mengembalikan kesalahan sementara, yang dapat dicatat oleh PowerMTA™. Informasi ini dapat digunakan untuk menyesuaikan volume untuk bumbu IP (pemanasan) atau kecepatan pengiriman maksimum, atau menyetel konfigurasi mode mundur.

For more comprehensive information on configuration settings, join the PowerMTA forum and don’t hesitate to ask detailed questions about your settings and more specifically about your sending environment.

~ Maarten Oelering, Partner and CTO at Postmastery