Using different mail servers to send & receive

[fleetwood]

We are have a lot of problems with mail that is sent to Yahoo address being deferred and often failing.
I haven't had any joy trying to sort this out with Yahoo yet, and am assuming that our sending address is being incorrectly labelled on a blacklist.

What I would like to do is change the outgoing email to a new unlisted domain (to protect against rogue email harvesting), but I can't see how I can do this without changing our contact details, which I do not want to do.

So basically I would like to have:

us@mydomain.co.uk - incoming mail

us@myunlisteddomain - outgoing mail

Any idea if this is possible?

[NormanRouxel]

Whether this will work is dependent on your hosting people. Best ask them (and ask them about the Yahoo problem too - it may be related to the IP address of the SMTP server rather than any associated domain names).

[fleetwood]

Thanks for the reply Norman

I have a feeling that you may be right regarding the IP address.
Am I right in thinking that if I am on a shared server (which I am), that mail from all the domains on that server may be seen as coming from one source by the receiving email servers? So if my shared server is hosting one bad boy, we are all seen as bad boys?

With regard your suggestion of asking my host about using different domains, I may not have explained myself fully enough.

I was planning on using a different host from the one hosting my site, just to send email, thus trying to overcome any difficulty that may be related to my site domain email address.

ie. site hosted with host1. incoming mail remaining on host1 so as not to confuse customer.

outgoing mail via a different domain on a different host.

My question is, can I configure Actinic to do this?

[NormanRouxel]

Actinic doesn't deal with incoming mail in any way (that's the job of Outlook, etc on your backoffice PC).

Actinic running on your server sends the customer emails.

There are some options.

1) Whether you can use a different reply-to address (in your Business Settings) for the customer emails that looks like it's from a different domain is up to your server setup (these emails are sent from Perl scirpts on your server).

2) Whether you can configure Actinic (Perl scripts running again on the server) to use different SMTP server (non blocked IP address) is again up to your server setup.

can I configure Actinic to do this

Yes. But whether they will work is up to your server setup.

[NormanRouxel]

Is it that my first test email worked because sending an email runs via the current settings that are currently uploaded to my site, rather than referencing the local settings that I have changed, but not yet uploaded, or is there something I am missing?

I think you've worked it out correctly.

Mails are sent via Perl scripts running on your server. The server will be using whatever settings you last Uploaded with.

Network Setup / Test uses the current Network Setup settings, so if that doesn't work it's likely you'll break your site if you upload these.

I have registered a new domain (emailhost) on a different host to the one hosting my website (websitehost).

As I said a couple of times, you should really ask your server people if this would be allowed. What you're asking is that

a) Your server allows you to open an outgoing SMTP mail connection to a server on a different host.

b) This new host will allow incoming connections from a foreign server to send mail through it.

I cannot say what will happen in the scenarios above - only the respective server owners can. Or you can run tests and see.


Neither

[fleetwood]

Sorry - deleted my message (the one you are replying to) before I saw that you had replied!

Thanks for all the help Norman - like you said - the solution was at the server end (took a while to drum into my head!).

The new host does provide a facility to send email whilst keeping an external site host, but its rather more complicated to set up than I care for.

Rather than mess around now, I'll hang on until we move host (which is the eventual plan, along with one day launching my revamp to V8!!!!).

thanks again