RancerDS wrote:Thank you for the head's up.
No worries.
RancerDS wrote:I couldn't get the mailer within BNT to work at all.
Yeah, a load of people has issues with sending emails within BNT.
TBH I never had any issues in sending the actual emails, it was whether they got blocked or not.
RancerDS wrote:The reference to a mail-server was one of Google's.
Ah, not really tried using Googles mail server to send BNT's emails.
I know I wrote my own mailer PHP Script that signed the emails that I sent using DKIM (DomainKey Signing), which worked fine for a while then started to get blacklisted and listed as a mass email sending.
Which I then realised that all the main ISP that provide an email service all seem to use SPF, I won't get into what SPF is and how to set it up, but it requires a few records added to the domain that the mail server is a part of, this took a little while to get right.
RancerDS wrote:Since you'd sent me this e-mail, that reference was removed from config.php.
What refference was removed?, a bit confused now
RancerDS wrote:One of the things I'd attempted in the last week was to set up a home-based e-mail server.
You will have issues sending emails to most top mail services, they might be ok at first, but will end up just blocking your emails and just returning a 5xx error code with a message moaning about dynamic ip usage etc.
There is nothing you can do to get around this if you are to run the mail server at home.
RancerDS wrote:Unfortunately, the sites that indicated how to set up postfix & dovecot were either incomplete or simply out-dated.
Yeah, I just let my younger brother set all that up, this Dedicated Rack Server which is located in a data centre some place in Germany, and its not just for BNT stuff, loads of stuff is using it, the last time I checked a few companies was using it.
But yeah, you really need to be sending emails from the same server that is running the mail server, the IP and reverse DNS lookup need to match.
RancerDS wrote:What I had been doing was manually typing out and sending the new player's passwords.
That's doable for a few players, but what if you have say a few hundred or more.
It was bad enough when I was checking every account on all 3 of our games, that was very time consuming especially when I was checking the players actions to see if they was using multi accounts.
It got to a point where I wrote my own PHP code you already probably know of call "The Governor" which ended up being a plugin before I took the games offline.
That script worked rather well considering it was only to detect multi accounts, which ended up doing all the logging and checking all the interactions between other players etc.
RancerDS wrote:From what you're saying, it looks as if I'll have to make doubly sure that I'm not accidentally mass-mailing anything out.
You have no way not to, they class you as mass emailing when you are sending the same formatted emails to multiple email addresses on the same mail service provider.
Think of it like this...
A player signs up to your game where your server sends them the email with their password in.
Now most mail services that care about spam runs a grey list which delays emails by say 5 to 15 mins and any repeats of the same emails being sent gets blocked and risks the chance of being classed as a spammer, so basically the decent mail services will see this error code and think, hmm, a grey list, ok I will resend the email again in 5 to 15 mins and all is fine that time round.
So this player checks his Inbox and no email, now it could be in their spam folder due to its format and content, or it could be delayed due to a grey listing.
So what does that player do, well that player will go to the game and ask for it to be resent and leave that page open for when they cannot find it.
I know this to be true due to I have seen thie happening in the BNT Extreme Logs that my plugin done.
So its not something that you need to be careful about, its all down to all your users/players.
RancerDS wrote:Yes, I can get a Static IP... but the costs and other limitations would prevent me from going that route for the foreseeable future.
Ah ok.
Yeah our ISP in the UK refuses to give out a Static IP for the Home User, now if your a Business User then yeah you can have one, but it will cost you more.
I think the last time I checked our server had a few Static IP's and so does the new server that the BNT stuff was to be moved over to.
RancerDS wrote:Again, am very glad you told me I may end up being black-listed.
Oh, no doubt about that, like I said Ron Harwood was being black listed all the time for using a dynamic IP, it would take me hours and days to get them lifted and a few weeks later back again, I think that was one of the main reasons why he let me run them all on our server, less hassle on him LOL.
RancerDS wrote:The fact the ISP changed IP's on me may have been directly as a result to what you've pointed out.
No, ISP's rotate their dynamic IP's for a few reasons.
1: Security.
If a Modem/Router had its firewall disabled due to an exploit in its firmware then people on that network would/might be at risk, and rotating the dynamic ip address given to the modem/router (i.e. broadband network ip address) it makes it difficult for get back to that same device after ip change.
2: Lack of IPv4 addresses available.
We as in everyone has used up all the IPv4 range of IP addresses which is why we are all gradually moving over to IPv6, and due to not everyone leaving their Modem/Router connected all the time it frees up an IP address for somebody else to use.
There was a few other reasons why ISP's use dynamic IP that change every x time, but I just cannot remember.