Don't Use Google to send emails

[anat]

For those who have already sent marketing emails or have their own mail server you can ignore this post.
Hi,
So a word of caution.
If you want to send marketing emails don't send them out via Google's SMTP servers.

You can receive email using Gmail, but using them for sending a number of almost identical HTML emails will very quickly cause them to get blocked and rejected as SPAM.

You should instead setup a local MTA (Mail Transport Agent) such as Exim4, Postfix or Sendmail (assuming your using Linux), and configure SugarCRM to send emails locally, but from the correct email address, allowing it to use Gmail's IMAP settings.

The story
Our communications manager wanted to send out a newsletter to 2,000+ contacts on a new install of SugarCRM.

Our organisation is using a free version of Google Apps which means that emails for the anat.org.au domain are handled using Gmail and I created a Google App user specifically for the SugarCRM.

I used the 'prefill Gmail defaults' in the Admin->Email Settings and Admin->Inbound Email
This meant that it was using Google Email server for both outgoing and incoming email, saving me from having to configure any email services locally... I was wrong.

The test emails came back fine. Emails looked good, couldn't see any errors.
After finally working out the SugarCRM cronjob and scheduler the first batch of 100emails that got sent out and I went home.
I come in to work the next day only to find that the emails didn't send properly. Google email servers thought the the batch emails were spam and prevented them from actually being sent. On top of that the few emails that did go through were sent showing the raw HTML as text, not actually as HTML, so the newsletter was unreadable.

I setup Exim4 on the Linux machine running Sugar and set the outgoing mail server settings to localhost on port 25. Tried again and this time the emails went through fine.

One thing I should mention, if your domain has SPF (Sender Policy Framework) settings which don't say your SugarCRM server's Internet IP address can send emails on the domains behalf, then your going to have to change the settings.

NB : I'm using a locally hosted SugarCRM v5.5 - Community edition on a LAMP box. Other editions and configurations may have other settings. This likely doesn't affect Sugar hosted applications.

[benacheson]

This is a very real problem. But Google's spam policies are designed to protect recipients.

Bulk email is becoming increasingly unpopular and there are many alternative, less intrusive methods of engaging with customers.

I recommend against sending bulk email using any mail server that you value - especially your business' mail server. You will quickly end up on multiple blacklists.

[roblaus]

Appreciate your warning but your aren't 100% correct:

1. The free version of Google Apps only permits 500 emails per 24hrs. As far as I know this restriction is valid per account, not per domain (don't quote me on that). We are running said configuration now for years and never had a problem with mails marked as spam.

2. Sugar in version >= 5.5 will not permit any other MTA than SMTP. So one needs to find (or set up) an SMTP provider who can handle larger volumes of outgoing emails (don't be surprised if these people consider "large" > 100,000 to millions)

[jame123]

why not ?

google email is a good service,,i have been using it for so long...never faced any problem
why would you say such thing about such a big service provider/

[smithseo]

I don't know, why are you saying like that. I use Google accounts to send emails to my friends and within a network, i never harmed by google email services. Google has the limits of sending bulk emails(Max. 100 emails at a time) and whenever you will cross It's limit on that time you can face the problems. otherwise it's email service work properly.