One of the things I absolutely can't stand about running a forum is having to deal with unreliable email. Thread notifications, PM notifications and other important emails that vBulletin sends out are essential to maintaining growth. If you miss incoming emails because they are mislabeled as spam that hurts. For those of you that require members to activate you very well could lose 10-15 active members a day depending on the activity on your forum if you activation emails never arrive.

Not to mention the load off your server from having it manage your emails.

Well, I've finally solved all those problems I've officially transfered two of my domains to Google. Now the sending and receiving of emails is handled by Google. 6GB of storage space for the free version along with IMAP and POP3 support. The most accurate spam detection in the world. All yours for free.

You can check out the details of it here: Google Apps

I'll probably end up paying the 50 dollars just because it's so cheap for the extra space and flexibility you get.

Now, there is one catch to setting up your vBulletin to send email via Google's SMTP service. They cap you at sending 500 emails a day per email address. This isn't a big deal for all but the busiest forums. The plus side though is that it's per email and you get 100 emails out of the box. You can request more but I haven't had a need to yet.

So what I am working on now is this:

I use forum[at]mustangevolution.com as my contact email for my Mustang Forum. All email sent via the forum will have a send address of that. Now, I have also created 9 more email addresses, forum1-forum9[at]mustangevolution.com.

With the way that vBulletin handles SMTP setups you provide a username and password. The username for those 9 accounts are the email addresses. The passwords for all 9 are the same. This means that all I have to do now is rotate through those 9 emails.

Those 9 email addresses now give me 500x9 = 4500 emails a day.

I have been talking to a few people to see if they would be willing to give the modification a shot, I don't think it would be hard to do. Basically all you do is for every email sent you rotate. Forum1 sends one then the next email that goes out uses forum 2. Spread the emails out evenly over the 9 email addresses.

If anyone on here thinks they can do it let me know. I don't have a problem paying for your time and I'll even release it on vBulletin.org.

Just wanted to share this. I haven't run into any problems so far and it's been using it for 2 days. I get emails literally within 2 seconds of them being sent . Previously it would take minutes when sending via the email server we have.

The best part also is that you can view each email that is sent out by your board by logging in either via imap or into gmail.

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Ford Mustang Forums - F-Series Trucks

Thanks for this. I'll look into it!

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Will Stumpf - TalkNikon
Submit your sites -> Quality Link Directory

I found someone to do this, cycle the emails every 400.

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Ford Mustang Forums - F-Series Trucks

This is very interesting, though I am having a bit of trouble connecting my domain to their email service.

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How so?

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Ford Mustang Forums - F-Series Trucks

I use outlook and it works fine with 4 email addresses, and a few hundered emails a day.
I also have never had a problem sending emails out from our forum, we use gaz and it send out to 3,000+ emails with no problems

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