My app needs to send emails from several addresses: noreply#, accounts# and support#, for instance. Now I'm setting up country-specific domains.
To send emails from Appengine, the sender address has to be a registered admin. To become an admin, you need to have a Google Apps account. But it appears you can't use aliases ("nicknames") - when you click the invite link, you have to log in, which you can't do as an alias. I think this also means I can't set up the country-specific domains as alias domains in Google Apps.
I'm not a cheapskate, but paying $50 per account (three accounts times five domains - $2,250) per year purely to validate the sender addresses is a bit rich. Am I missing something blindingly obvious?
Unfortunately that's how it currently works.
From what I understand GAE team is working on alternate solutions and while they figure out something they offer an AppEngine credit.
But that only works once per App.
We handle this by using an external service (SendGrid, that introduced a pay-as-you-go offer with the same pricing as AppEngine). However if you want full DKIM or other features it becomes much more expensive.
Related
I'm building a website for a client who wants to showcase his company's products.His company has like 5 sub companies. For example, his company is called Nazzy industries (named after Nazzy his endeared grandmama). Nazzy Industries has 5 sub-companies. One distributes snacks, one sells safety equipment, one sells cars.
I"m going to build a large website but I may want to serve sub companies in their own domains in the future. Is this possible?
This is possible with a little workaround.
You need to first verify ownership of all the domain names (through the google cloud console). Console > AppEngine > Settings > Custom Domains
In the application you will need to check from which domain the request is incoming. All languages should support that already, a simple thing.
This information is not verified from zero to production. But almost sure this can be done this way.
For both Standard and Flexible you set up your domain names in Products & Services > App Engine > Settings > Custom Domains using wildcards and subdomains in following ways:
Have services named cars, snacks, etc, which will be mapped to cars.nazzy.com, snacks.nazzy.com, etc.
Later you can separate them to different domains, like: ncars.com, nsnacks.com .
You can set it up in one way and then transition to the other without changing code or configuration of your applications at all.
I have successfully setup Postfix with SPF and DKIM using Google Apps (paid account with custom domain).
Before SPF and DKIM, the admin notifications ended up in spam folder but after setting those up, the emails go to my inbox (without even whitelisting the domain!)
Now, I am using tools like OSSEC which send a lot of admin notifications per day. These are only send to my own personal email address.
Is this going to affect the spam rating of my domain in the foreseeable future?
as from my personal experience I would be quite self convinced in such situation that sending such admin notification shouldn't affect your sender reputation. As far as SPF and DKIM are properly configured and you still sending to your own address only it must not have any negative effect.
Here's the situation: I have successfully set up email to come from a custom domain on App Engine before, but that was always done through the Google Apps for Business set up process. This time I have added the custom domain through the new developers console instead (https://console.developers.google.com/project/[APP_ID]/appengine/settings/domains) and now I'm getting the "unauthorized sender" error every time.
I've tried a lot of variations on the set up process, checked for typos or other potential bugs repeatedly, and scoured both the docs and Stack Overflow without finding an answer. Most of the docs and answers that come up seem woefully out of date. The docs hardly ever reference the new developer console or the fact that Google Apps for Business doesn't have a free tier any more. And most of the answers seem to ignore the fact that the docs (https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/mail/sendingmail) explicitly state that "Domain accounts do not need to be explicitly verified, since you will have verified the domain during the registration process."
So has anyone actually gotten domain accounts to work with the new process? Do I have to modify DNS records? DKIM? Something else I'm missing? Any insight would be much appreciated.
As stated in the docs:
For security purposes, the sender address of a message must be the
email address of an administrator for the application or any valid
email receiving address for the app (see Receiving Mail). The sender
can also be the Google Account email address of the current user who
is signed in, if the user's account is a Gmail account or is on a
domain managed by Google Apps.
So only logged in Google accounts or admin (owners in the new console) addresses can be used to send emails through GAE. If you want to use a set of custom domain addresses you can either:
1) Add and validate all those addresses as owners in the project's "permissions" settings.
2) Use as external party to send your emails through a Web API, EG Sendgrid which gives you 25.000 emails/month for free for GAE developers (https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/mail/sendgrid)
I have different customers who own each their own hosted saas page on my gae app. for example:
myapp.appspot.com/customer/123
myapp.appspot.com/customer/456
each of the customers may want his domain name for example theBigDomain.com to "invisibilly" forward to myapp.appspot.com/customer/123
Please notice I want theBigDomain.com/myservlet?id=theId#aBookmarkUrl to be transmitted to the target url as myapp.appspot.com/customer/123/myservlet?id=theId#aBookmarkUrl
I searched for the google documentation and I can't find a way to do that.
Note: I don't want a redirect where the person who types theBigDomain.com finds he's not there anymore, and I don't want a frame to include my url in the theBigDomain.com since I want the user to be able to click on the back button.
In short, I want the domains to work as proxies, knowing that from what I know, proxies are not good for some content, for exampe, if my target link has a youtube video, this might not work. So I'm asking if there is a way to do a dns redirect for a url and not a domain???
Using subdomains is also limited: creating a subdomain for each customer will be a tedious work...
Using subdomains is also limited: creating a subdomain for each customer will be a tedious work...
How so? This could actually be a lot easier for you/your customers since your customers wouldn't have to deal with domain verification/DNS settings and all you would need to do is add one * (wildcard) host to your main domain pointing to ghs.googlehosted.com and adding *.yourdomain.com in your GAE apps's settings. In your app, in your framework of choice you would then see what subdomain the request came to and and handle it as the customer's unique id (instead of 123/456). See here how you would determine the subdomain on python/webapp2. If you're using a different combination of language/framework - there are alternatives functions as well.
If you still want the customers to use their own domains then it gets a little more complicated. First, they need to provide the full domain name to you, you then add it to your GAE app's settings. Next, you and your customers need to follow one of the verifications steps listed on this page: https://support.google.com/a/answer/60216?hl=en and once that is complete you would need to ask your customers to create a CNAME record on their domains/subdomains pointing to ghs.googlehosted.com. Once the CNAME record is created, you would handle this just like the if these were subdomains on your own domain, i.e. in your framework determine what domain the request came to and handle it as a customer's unique ID to serve that customer's app.
What I have done:
I have added my domain app.mydomain.com to my app engine project, and can successfully visit id.appspot.com using app.mydomain.com.
I have registered mydomain.com on google app for business.
The problem:
The problem is -- I am NOT able to send emails using #mydomain.com address. If I register an info#mydomain.com as an developer, this will probably solve the problem, but we need to send from more than one address, and I don't think registering a new developer for each address is reasonable.
Anybody knows how to solve this? Thanks!
You have two options:
Register all emails that you want to use as administrators/developers but as you mentioned in your post you don't want to do that.
Use SendGrid (or any other email services like Mandrill, Mailgun, etc.) which will give you a lot more features comparing to what GAE offers, including 25k free emails instead of GAE's 100.
According to the docs, the sender would need to be an administrator on the project (called "owner" in the new Developers Console). Another route would be to just use a separate email sending service like SendGrid or Postmark.
You can use the GMail API to send emails as users of your domain. Note that the emails need to be aliases, groups or users of your domain.
You shouldn't have any problem adding and verifying your domain, adding the necessary permissions to send emails. Then, every email address in your domain can be used. See here in the docs: https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/java/mail/#Java_Sending_mail