Outgoing mail changes

Following on from yesterday’s "outsourcing" of the DNS nameservers, today outgoing mail was delegated to a new third-party provider, AuthSMTP.

Just like yesterday, from and end user perspective everything should continue working exactly as before and all email addresses are unchanged; it’s just that behind the scenes outgoing mail is now being relayed through AuthSMTP’s servers rather than being delivered directly by Sendmail running on this server.

As I mentioned yesterday, these changes are laying the groundwork for some bigger changes to the hosting set-up in the near future. I’ve been very happy with the quality of my current webhost, INetU, but it’s time to move to a more flexible, modular infrastructure and the first step is separating out concerns like DNS and mail from the website. More details to follow.

Update (27 November 2009)

The new set-up has been in place for about a week now and everything seems to be going well. Outgoing emails from me and registration information has always worked, but outgoing mails from the Rails application powering this site were broken until only a few hours ago; this means that things like email confirmation messages and lost password helpers weren’t working.

I hadn’t noticed the problem because: firstly, I was still getting the BCC’ed on all such messages as well as getting notifications for new comments and issues posted by users (because deliveries to my example@example.com address evidently don’t go through authsmtp.com); and secondly, the failed delivery attempts weren’t showing up in the AuthSMTP control panel which I was watching (for some reason, that particular class of error, they appear in a separate log which was non-obvious to me at first).

So the problem was discovered this afternoon doing post-deployment testing, and solved soon after. As far as I know now, absolutely all outgoing mail is now functioning with the new set-up. As always, if you spot any problems (or don’t get mail from me which you were expecting), please let me know either via email to example@example.com or by opening a ticket in the issue tracker.