Setting up systems that generate mail

End-users should refer to the documentation on configuring mail clients for interactive mail clients such as Outlook, Thunderbird and Apple Mail.

The device or application is on the university network

There are two cases that need to be considered:

1. The device or application has its own on-board mail transport system which accepts mail from the client software and passes it on.
2. The device or application has no on-board mail transport system.

The device or application has its own on-board mail transport system

This will be the case where the client software generating the mail is configured to use "localhost" or "127.0.0.1" as its SMTP relay or smart host. This will be a common setup on linux and other unix-like systems. The machine can be regarded as a "robust" mail sender, and it can connect to internalmailrelay.ed.ac.uk.

The device or application has no on-board mail transport system.

The client software or service needs to be configured with an external SMTP relay or smart host to submit mail to. This sort of mail sender will generally be "fragile" in that it is incapable of gracefully handling temporary or permanent errors in the mail transport. It needs to connect to the service bulkmailrelay.ucs.ed.ac.uk, which is specially set up to minimise the chances of any such errors. First, though, the IS Enterprise Unix team (contact details below) needs to be notified of the connecting address so they can add it to the list of IP addresses which the bulk mail relay will accept mail from.

The application or service is hosted elsewhere

There are two cases that need to be considered:

1. The application or service can be configured to submit mail over authenticated SMTP.
2. The application or service cannot be configured like this and sends mail over the public internet.

Using authenticated SMTP

Identify or create a functional account that will be used to authenticate your SMTP connections and inform the IS Enterprise Unix team (contact details below).  They will authorise it to use the authenticated mail relay service and provide connection settings for you to apply.

Using the public internet

If the service sends email from an email address owned by the provider you do not need to take any further action.  However, you must not configure the service to send email using any existing university email addresses.  Mailbox providers may consider these email messages to be phishes and are therefore less likely to be successfully delivered.

If you require the service to send email from a university email address then a mail domain will need to be created, configured and assigned for your service. This will take significant time, effort and liason with your service provider to deliver.  Contact  IS Applications Service Management in this case.

Configuring correct sender addresses

In all cases when submitting mail through the unversity's mail relay service, the client software must take care to generate with sender addresses that are valid and that accept mail. Mail with invalid sender addresses often fails during transport. Furthermore, non-delivery reports generated by failed messages are returned to the sender address, and if this is not valid or does not accept mail they will end up being sent to the postmaster. They should instead go to someone who is interested in knowing that the mail has failed, and who is in a position to do something about it.

Generally this means that sender addresses should be fixed, valid addresses at one of the usual mail domains: ed.ac.uk, or some other mail domain associated with a university school or unit. Sender addresses should not be set from user input such as from a field in a web form, as users often get it wrong, though the From: or Reply-To: address may be set this way if the software allows it to be set differently to the sender. It is best to test that mail can be delivered to the sender address before configuring the software to generate mail from that address.

Getting assistance

The Enterprise Unix Services team within Information Services can give assistance on configuring servers, devices and software to correctly send and receive email.