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Configuring Your SMTP Server to Work With Sugar

Overview

A lot of useful functionality (notifications, emails, campaigns, etc.) depends on Sugar being configured with an outbound email server (SMTP). Setting up an SMTP server in Sugar is as simple as navigating to Admin > Email Settings, choosing "SMTP" as the mail transfer agent, and entering the server information. A fully working setup, however, may require additional configuration including changes on your email server.

Prerequisites

You must be an administrator.

Steps to Complete

Setting up your SMTP account to work with Sugar may require some or all of the following configurations.

Exchange Authentication

If you are sending from Sugar through an Exchange server, ensure that you have configured your SMTP Exchange server to accept "Basic Authentication".

Restricted IPs

Some email service providers restrict access to their servers to a predefined range of IP addresses. This means that the email server will only talk to a certain set of machines. You will need to speak with your system administrator, IT team, or email service provider to find out if access to your email server is restricted.

If you are a SugarCloud customer and your email service provider enforces IP restrictions, please review the Configuring Your SMTP Server to Work With SugarCloud article. On-site customers should speak with their system administrators regarding this issue.

Restricted "From" Address

In addition to IP restrictions, many email-service providers will restrict the "From Address" users are allowed to set on outbound emails. The "From Address" is how SMTP servers identify the sender of emails. In order to prevent a user from impersonating another sender users may be restricted to a set of allowed from addresses. Consider the scenario where the Administrator is configuring SMTP settings for Sugar. The Administrator has received credentials (system_administrator, secret_password) from the email service provider. The Administrator navigates to Admin > Email Settings and configures Sugar with these credentials. The Administrator also sets the "From Address" as "do_not_reply@my.domain.com". The Administrator navigates to the Emails module and attempts to send an email using the system outbound email account. Sugar reports "The following From Address was not allowed: do_not_reply@my.domain.com". The Administrator contacts the email service provider to report the issue. The email service provider informs the Administrator that when using the "system_administrator" account they are only allowed to send emails with a "From Address" of "system_administrator@my.domain.com". The email service provider offers a few solutions to the issue:

  1. Allow the "system_administrator" account to send emails as "do_not_reply@my.domain.com"
  2. Create a new "do_not_reply" account that can only send emails as "do_not_reply@my.domain.com"
  3. Create a new "system" account that can send emails as anyone in the "my.domain.com" domain

The Administrator chooses the third option and updates Sugar with the new "system" account under Admin > Email Settings. This option allows the system to send emails as any person within the "my.domain.com" domain. This will come in handy when the marketing team begins sending campaign emails as "marketing@my.domain.com" since the campaign module uses the system email settings to process outbound emails.

Message Throttling

Message throttling is a problem often encountered when working with campaigns. The campaign module allows users to prepare and send a marketing email to a large group of people with possibly thousands of recipients. Some email servers, due to server capacity or server settings, may be limited in the number of messages that can be processed over a given period of time. For example, Exchange servers provide email server administrators the ability to throttle the number of messages processed by the email server (Managing Message Throttling). If users are not aware of this limitation and send out a campaign, messages may fail to send. Sugar will attempt to send the failed messages later but a better solution is to control the flow of messages from Sugar to prevent failures. You should discuss the capabilities of your email server with your email service provider; they may be able to adjust throttling settings on the email server for improved performance.