Sending emails with “allow less secure apps” turned off in Gmail

[Thom_McGrath]

@Matthew_Stevens

There is still a business case for specialised uses, like m2m relay and forwarding. Shared cPanel accounts are so cheap these days it’s sort of rude not to.

Can’t say I’ve heard of an m2m relay, and Google isn’t helping me figure out what that is, at least in terms of email. But odds are I’ll disagree because $10/mo is cheap and Postmark handles a lot of use cases. For example, it handles the spam filtering addresses I use at https://thezaz.com/contact. When Postmark receives an email, a webhook is fired which I use to look up the validity of the address in my database. If valid, it sends the message to the real address and makes a notification to my Slack channel. If not, the message is black holed.

So of course, this is dependent on having a web server already. But that’s a low bar.

[Christian_Schmitz]

I would recommend to have your own domain for your website and then get it with a smtp server from a reliable hosting company.
Then you can use their server and have your domain in the email addresses instead of gmail.

if you use gmail, office365 or one of the other big services, you can do oAuth 2 usually. Like you can do it with MBS Plugins if you like.

[DerkJ]

This is where chat gpt would make a great anti-spam partner

[Thom_McGrath]

I don’t think so. Spam filters need to evolve. LLMs large enough to matter are massively expensive to train, and you’d need to be training constantly. Few companies can handle that kind of scale and have the training data to actually pull it off.

ChatGPT specifically is locked to training data that is already showing its age, and new versions are unlikely.

[Matthew_Stevens]

@Thom_McGrath

@Matthew_Stevens

There is still a business case for specialised uses, like m2m relay and forwarding. Shared cPanel accounts are so cheap these days it’s sort of rude not to.

Can’t say I’ve heard of an m2m relay, and Google isn’t helping me figure out what that is, at least in terms of email. But odds are I’ll disagree because $10/mo is cheap and Postmark handles a lot of use cases.

M2M is machine to machine. e.g. Some device or application with an embedded SMTP client that sends Email without human intervention and refuses to play with a cloud providers authentication and/or licensing and/or permissions grant mechanism. A printer, scanner or CCTV more often than not. A Xojo app that is utilising the SMTP socket classes might be another example.

For example, it handles the spam filtering addresses I use at https://thezaz.com/contact. When Postmark receives an email, a webhook is fired which I use to look up the validity of the address in my database.

I wasn’t commenting on your specific business case.

I generally agree with the points you made. I disagree with the blanket statement. Most of your objection revolves around spam and deliverability issues that some use cases inherently mitigate. In any case, relaying through a ‘free’ gmail account is probably the worse possible option.

[Thom_McGrath]

Oh Machine to Machine? Postmark is excellent at that. Just use their API to send emails with URLConnection. It’s significantly easier than using SMTP. Frankly, aside from being used to actually deliver emails between providers (for example Postmark to Google) I consider SMTP dead. I literally never use it.

[Matthew_Stevens]

Only works with Postmark…That could seriously narrow the customer base xD

LOL. Maybe in years to come SMTP will be dead. For the moment there is a bunch of equipment in the field that talks SMTP and nothing else.

[Thom_McGrath]

Well… no. It depends on your use case. If your system is sending emails on your behalf, use something like Postmark, MailGun, SendGrid, and so on. If your system is ending emails on your customer’s behalf, that’s a different challenge entirely. But SMTP is a poorly secured mess, and that’s why Google and the others are trying to kill it.