I am setting up a vps and am having second thoughts regarding my plan for email after reading several posts in this forum. I will be hosting several of my own sites plus a few client sites and need to provide email for them. I currently only use email for transactional pruposes but will need the ability to send out mass mailings to a few thousand registered users a month eventually and want my clients to have the same ability.

Right now, my plan is to use Postfix, Dovecot, and MySQL on my Centos 6 vps to provide email services. I have never setup an email server before and it seems a bit involved to say the least. I have not found a comprehensive guide to the setup though there is plenty of quality documentation for Postfix and Dovecot themselves.

My question is, how would those of you with experience approach this? Is my plan reasonable or are there alternatives that would be better suited to my needs?

To handle real incoming mail for real business customers who aren't interested in Nigerian wire transfers and male enhancement, Google Apps. It's only $5/mo/user, and provides more than just e-mail.

To handle real outgoing automated mail, services like Mandrill for transactional mail and Mailchimp for bulk mail are excellent.

Yes, these services cost money. Turns out that setting up an e-mail server is trivial, but becoming trusted to send good mail to the rest of the world is not easy.

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Thanks for the reply! This part of your reply is what made me reconsider my original plans:

Could you expand upon this a bit more? I assume that being 'untrusted' means mail ends up in the recipients spam folder? How does one become trusted or, alternatively, what other trusted services are available? I have some time to play around with possible solutions before I commit to one, at this point I am trying to figure out what I need to become familiar with before utilizing it in a production environment. Thanks again!

As two examples, Gmail tends to put messages from unknown IP addresses to the Spam folder, until a certain number of them are "saved" with the Not Spam button. This isn't difficult, but it does take time (and making your customers dig through their Spam folder when you add a new server is ridiculous).

Hotmail (now known as Outlook.com) is somewhat more onerous, sometimes requiring a bit of paperwork to get them to accept your mail.

I can't provide a complete list of all the outsourced e-mail providers out there, but Rackspace has mail hosting options and Amazon has a transactional mail service.

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