Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Hosting Security and Technology : Mailshot and external mail server

[TWD-Tony]

I was wondering what you guys thought was the best way of going about the following:

I have a client who has hosting with another company for their website and they have their own internal MS Exchange server for email...

In order to switch the hosting to one of my servers they just need to alter the A record for the website to my webserver's IP address at the registrar - correct?

They also want to start sending a "mailshot" to existing clients - what is the best way of doing this? I have no experiance of Exchange Server so I am thinking of running something simple like phpList on the webserver but how can this be configured to use their Exchange Server?

I am thinking that if I just setup phplist as normal then the emails it sends would bounce, is the trick to setup phplist differently or to change the servers DNS settings for that domain?

Thanks

P.S. - the server is running CentOs and cPanel

[Panopta]

Yes, updating the A record to point to your server's IP address will begin to route HTTP traffic to your new server (it will take a little while for all traffic to be sent to your server, depending on the TTL that's setup currently).

For email, you could use the Exchange SMTP service from your PHP script, or an easier way would be to just run a SMTP server (postfix, exim, etc.) locally on your Linux server, and send mail out through that. Just make sure to add the IP address to your client's SPF records so that receiving servers will see it as legitimate messages.

[TWD-Tony]

Thanks for that - what is going to be the easiest of the solutions you suggested? In terms of easiest I mean less prone to errors / bounces?

Also - can someone just confirm this bit...

Just make sure to add the IP address to your client's SPF records so that receiving servers will see it as legitimate messages

I take it you mean to add a SPF record to the website's DNS settings but using the Exchange server's IP address?

Thanks!

[Panopta]

I would recommend going with the local SMTP server personally, but either will work pretty well. You'll want to setup the SPF record in the DNS settings for the domain name, and list all of the IP addresses that might be sending mail out for the domain. There's a setup tool at http://www.openspf.org/ that walks you through this process - just follow their questions and you should be set.

[TWD-Tony]

Originally Posted by Panopta

I would recommend going with the local SMTP server personally, but either will work pretty well. You'll want to setup the SPF record in the DNS settings for the domain name, and list all of the IP addresses that might be sending mail out for the domain. There's a setup tool at http://www.openspf.org/ that walks you through this process - just follow their questions and you should be set.

Thank you Panopta - your help is much appreciated...