Re: Email sending problem -- any Google Relay experts here?

On Tue, Oct 18, 2022 at 10:11 AM Patrik Schindler <poc@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hello Brad,

Am 18.10.2022 um 15:04 schrieb Brad Stone <bvstone@xxxxxxxxx>:

I know people think email is simple, but it's not.

Yes and no. Allow me to expand on your valid claims: You *can* make email
easy but you also can make it overly complicated. From my European PoV, the
main issue I observe in this group is "Big Company" IT staff trying to
abuse "end user services" like Gmail, MSO365, Yahoo and the likes for
relaying purposes. These are meant to be used with an email application on
an end user device and not a server!

Sending email from the IBM i as a client... you can call it a server, but
it's acting as a client. It's both.

Add this fact to the limited capabilities of the SMTP server within IBM i
— primarily thought of as a database vehicle and not a proper mail server —
to get an idea why this combination is very likely to give you headaches.

It's been that way for years, which is why I created MAILTOOL Plus to
bypass it. Thousands of customers agree it's very, very nice.

I often see blue-eyed assumptions about simple SMTP without any twists
about authentication and absolutely no Anti-Spam measures (such as DNS
checks for forward-PTR-consistency and the like) being active. Which
nowadays just isn't the case anymore.

Agreed, and using mail relays like GMail or O365 they provide that for
you.

This is where people usually start complaining that "it doesn't work".
Including some ignorance about complaining without checking the MSF
journals for clues first (when using integrated IBM i SMTP support).

Because they have FIREWALL set to *NO and are delivering directly. I've
mentioned this many times.

To me, this seems a typical case of not adhering to the five P: Proper
preparation prevents poor performance, and covers a much larger area than
just sending mail with IBM i.

Yep. But this deals with just sending mail as a client from the IBM i.
Call it a "server" if you want, but it's also a client. No different than
your PC email client, thunderbird, web interface, etc.