I’ve got all the configuration sorted out and working but I, like many self-hosters, have been hit with having account limited from the get-go.
I have to do 2-3 weeks of normal sending while only being able to send newsletters to 9 people at a time. (That limitation is fine as it’s a new site and I’m building a mail list anyway, I’ve a few people who are helping me test things and they within the batch limit in terms of numbers.)
But what’s the best way to comply with Mailgun’s paranoid system here to finally get the account unrestricted?
Like, do I need to be sending newsletters daily? Or can I send in the publishing rhythm I’m intending to keep which would be a couple of emails a week?
I don’t want to be encouraging people to sign up for my site while these limitations are in place, because apart from anything it looks like Mailgun could just decide you’re a spammer without you being one and leave you high and dry as a Ghost blogger.
Totally get where you’re coming from. Stick to your planned rhythm, keep things clean and consistent, and Mailgun should gradually lift the limits once they see steady engagement.
One thing that elevates your risk of being marked as spam is the host ip of your server. I’m not sure if this is the issue you might be running into, but one extra thing worth looking at is switching smtp to just the mailgun transport option for things like registration emails. Wrote a little bit about this here.
Thanks for pointing that out. I looked at the source of an email I sent, using Gmail (view Original option) and searched for the VPS IP address, but the only IP address in it is not one related to my VPS.
Ah! Okay, now I see what you mean. I’m not using Docker though, I’m installed through the CLI, so what changes would I be making to my config file to change this?
The mail object of your config file should look similar to this format below, with the mailgun account api key there instead of the mailbox user password previously used. Also note that non-eu host setting would be api.mailgun.net.