Mail Server Setup

Mail server setup

The most common reason people get in touch: emails from the store are not arriving, or land in spam. The second: you want your own mail on your domain instead of free services.

What is included

• configuring sending and receiving mail on your domain;
• the records without which messages are treated as suspicious: SPF, DKIM, DMARC;
• a reverse DNS record for the IP address — without it some servers reject mail outright;
• spam and brute-force protection;
• encrypted connections for mail clients;
• delivery testing against the major mail providers.

Why store emails do not arrive

Usually the mail server is not the problem. The problem is that the site sends mail through PHP's built-in function without authentication. Such a message looks suspicious: the sender address is on your domain, but it was sent from a server with no authority to do so. Mail systems either file it as spam or reject it.

So in many cases you do not need your own mail server at all — correctly configured SMTP sending is cheaper and more reliable.

An important caveat

Some hosts block outbound mail at network level. In that case your own mail server will not work regardless of configuration — this gets checked before any work starts.