Outgoing SMTP / ‘smarthost’ service

Configuring your Virtual Machine to properly send email can be difficult. Accidental misconfiguration can result in your machine being an unwitting relay for spam, or junk email (a sin for which most internet providers will block your mail server for, including us), or to silently swallow outgoing email for days instead of sending it to its destination.

A ‘smarthost’ is a mail server set up by an internet provider which accepts mail for customers and delivers it on their behalf. We provide such a server and we will relay messages that fulfill the following criteria:

• The envelope MAIL FROM: address must be routable (i.e. exist and have a valid MX record)
• The envelope RCPT TO: address must also be routable.
• To connect to the relay your host IP address must be in the Bytemark IP range.
• The message must be 20MB or smaller.
• Your machine is not sending more than 240 messages every 6 hours.

More details about the configuration of the server can be found on the forum.

You can configure your mail software to use ours by telling it to use:

smtp.bytemark.co.uk

We have usually set this up for you as the default smarthost on your machine.