Help:Email in Cloud VPS

This page contains information on best practices for managing email in Cloud VPS.

We use the word email here as a way to refer to the several protocols involved in modern and secure email exchange (smtp, spf, dkim, dmarc, pop, imap, etc).

There are some considerations you need to take into account when planning to use these emails protocols inside Cloud VPS.

Best practices

A collection of best practices.

Using Cloud VPS smtp servers

All Cloud VPS VMs have a mail relay running, so in most cases you can set the SMTP host to localhost and port to 25. Those are set to relay mail via mx-out03.wmcloud.org and mx-out04.wmcloud.org, although those can change occasionally without warning so using them directly is not recommended.

Sending emails from a Cloud VPS domain

If you send emails from a software running inside Cloud VPS, and you configure the software the use From: address that belongs to a Cloud VPS domain (such as wmflabs.org or wmcloud.org), make sure you are using the appropriate relay smtp server (see section above).

Not using our smtp relay servers can result in SPF errors in the destination smtp server refusing your emails.

Sending emails from a non-Cloud VPS domain

If you need to send emails from a software running inside Cloud VPS, and you need a From: address that does not belongs to a Cloud VPS domain (such as wmflabs.org or wmcloud.org) so people reading the email replies to a different address, this is our recommendation.

• Use a From: address from a Cloud VPS domain, such as noreply@wmflabs.org. Include a Reply-to: address in your desired external domain.
• Use CloudVPS smtp servers as relay.

Example:

TODO: write an example email

See also

• Cloud VPS DNS setup (technical information for cloud engineers / administrator)
• phabricator T235401 - Emails from discourse-mediawiki.wmflabs.org softfail SPF
• Cloud VPS email setup (technical information for cloud engineers / administrators)