Send emails through Google Apps?

[beley]

Is it possible to send email out using Google Apps instead of the "server" i.e. sendmail?

We have all our email configured at Google Apps, so when our web server sends an email out it automatically goes to the spam folder. Our customers with hotmail, yahoo and aol constantly complain that they didn't get emails from us.

It's particularly bad for us with one particular order, because they set a gift certificate email address and I can't see how to change it anywhere. We've sent it three times now and the customer says they never got it.

REALLY need to be able to configure ShopSite to use an external mail server...

[loren_d_c]

You CAN configured ShopSite to use an external SMTP server, however ShopSite does not support any of the various SMTP authentication schemes, so the SMTP server would have to be either on an internal network so it wouldn't have to require authentication to relay, or configured to relay without authentication when the email comes from your ShopSite server's IP. I doubt that Google's mail service can be configured that way, but if you have an SMTP server that you have full control over administering then it should be able to be configured like that.

-Loren

[loren_d_c]

Oh, and as far as how to configure ShopSite to send via SMTP instead of sendmail, edit the store's [storeid].aa file and comment out (by putting a # character at the beginning of the line) the 'sendmail_loc' line, and add a line like this:

smtp_host: [ip_or_hostname_of_smtp_server]:[optional_port_number_if_other_than_usual_port_25]

-Loren

[beley]

Okay, well since ShopSite doesn't support SMTP authentication I had to find another solution... took a while (okay, all afternoon) but I got it worked out.

I installed msmtp on my server. It's an SMTP gateway that has a Sendmail compatible interface so essentially it can "replace" sendmail in programs that don't allow more advanced email options (cough, cough) like ShopSite.

http://msmtp.sourceforge.net/

Essentially you just configure it per user (or per domain) on your server and it can replace Sendmail for sending out email. I have ours configured to send email out from service@2bigfeet.com which is perfect - that's where we want the replies going anyway.

You'll need root access to install msmtp or you could contact your hosting company and ask them to install it for you. Once it was installed and configured all I had to do was change my [storeusername].aa config file in ShopSite to point it to the new "SMTP server" and it worked.

So far it seems to be working really well. Our customer with a Hotmail address that was not getting our emails got the gift certificate a minute after I resent it on the new system.

The only problem I had was with the TLS server verification with Gmail's server. Turning that off fixed the problem and now it's sending like a champ.