Following on from last week’s outage we were unable to fully activate some settings on our native mail server, without creating an additional attack vector. Over the weekend we have been working to migrate our email (SMTP) to a dedicated cloud based service.
During the interim period some users may have experienced problems with the delivery of emails, this would only affect users who are sending mail via our server but from their own custom sender address. Users with their own SMTP setup or sending via noreply@quickfile.co.uk would have been unaffected.
##What changes were made?
From 10 am today any emails sent through QuickFile (excluding users with custom SMTP settings) will route through our new SMTP service (Amazon SES). For those that had a custom “sender address” configured, we will now bind that address in the reply-to header. This means that if your client hits reply to an email sent using QuickFile, the reply will come back to the address you configured.
If you have a look in Account Settings >> Routine Emails and notice your sender address is set to "noreply@quickfile.co.uk", it is now worth updating this to a sender email address of your choice.
##How will these changes improve reliability?
By routing our outbound mail through a dedicated SMTP provider, we can ensure that many of the routine spam filtering checks on the receiving end validate, without exposing details relating to our own infrastructure. We also have a highly scalable and robust email solution moving forward.
##Other benefits
Due to the increasingly sophisticated methods used by spammers, it has become more challenging to run a mail server locally. Moving to an outsourced solution will allow us to spend less time worrying about things like SPF, DKIM, DMARC etc and more time working on the core platform.
Finally anyone frequenting these forums may have observed how many conversations we have in relation to email deliverability. We appreciate that not all users want to run their own SMTP service or configure SPF records. The changes we have implemented today will provide a much more effective and reliable solution for those that just want to get on with managing their accounts.
##Users with existing SPF records
Any users with SPF records pointing to QuickFile.co.uk can now safely remove these records from their DNS settings.