Hi guys, I am thinking of offering a SMTP relaying server. Obviously I'll need a dedicated server and SMTP setup but I have no experience managing such server. I know basic server management but nothing advance. I was wondering if there's a script that work on the frontend that's available for purchase that I could install to manage users subscriptions? The service that I have in mind is something like this https://monthly.smtp.com/index.html Thanks in advance for your comments.
.Send a mail to whenever you encoutner any kind of server related issues. Worked in the field of Linux and Windows based server administration for more than 5 years. Not too mu
Seriously, are you nuts? Managing an SMTP server alone is a task, I'd try to avoid at all costs. Doing it without having any clue about it is insane. If you need a webinterface for administration, then you are toast. The story goes like this: You offer SMTP relay, thats nice and dandy and some customers will sign up. Next thing is a request to not only be able to send but also receive mail ("do it or we go to another supplier"). All of a sudden you have to care about things like MX records in DNS, POP3, IMAP and probably LDAP as a database backend. Of course, this opens the next can of worms, as users will suddenly also want spamfilter/virusprotection, out of office notification, forwarding and a webinterface (you know, all the stuff, they are used from google mail et all). This is where your bandwidth usage will explode and you run out of diskspace with your one dedicated server (did I already mention MX records?). Remember: People just love to send each other humorous emails where the joke consists of one supposedly funny image, that just has to be packaged as a powerpoint presentation and naturally the whole thing has to reliably stay in the inbox for years to come. Once you have satisfied the basic requirements, you'll find that somebody is pumping spam through your mailserver (either one of your customers or someone who found your server misconfigured). The result will be a blacklisting with all the major ISP and webmailers. I can assure you, it really is fun getting on AOLs blacklist Happened to me once for miscalculating a netmask and thus allowing mailrelay to the whole datacenter. Hard to track problem and lots of disgruntled costumers. In short: Stay clear of mailrelay services. Managing mailservers is the most labor intensive sysadmin job, I can think of and with all the freemailers around something, most people would not want to pay for anyway.