Input Your experience with "Mail delivery troubleshooting" in Plesk

[AYamshanov]

Server operating system version

Linux && Windows

Plesk version and microupdate number

18.0.x

Hi everyone,

Before asking about your experience regarding troubleshooting, let me bring some historical information

From year to year, we ask our users about most valuable and important features via annual surveys and take the result into account.

• In 2021 (Find the Plesk Obsidian 2021 survey results here!),
  • One of the most valuable features was "Mail Log Browser"
  • Part of the most desired features were "Mail delivery troubleshooting" (38.3%) and "Server-wide log browser"
• In 2022 (Check out the Plesk Obsidian 2022 survey results!),
  • One of the most valuable features was "Server-Wide Log Browser"
  • One of the most desired features was "Mail delivery troubleshooting" (36%)
• It looks like "Mail delivery troubleshooting" will also be in the list of most desired features in the 2023 annual survey.

Since the percentages don't change much, during the year, we are probably not investing in the area that customers expect and still have a lack of features here. Because of that, I would like to collect more information and details about real use-cases and scenarios for delivery troubleshooting you want. What typical and non-typical issues do you know? How do you troubleshoot delivery issues now? What tools do you use for troubleshooting? What do you expect from the feature in Plesk?

We appreciate any information!

 

[AYamshanov]

Is it really no one have issues with email delivery or troubleshooting mail delivery issues?

 

[Mark_NLD]

The Log Browser works great! Perhaps it is unknown to most?

It would be great if we could give customers access to the Log Browser - mail part in regards to their own domain(s).
Please see my related post here (and it's replies). So in short "Log Browser Extension for customers".

In regards to actual e-mail troubleshooting I guess most people use a tool like Newsletters spam test by mail-tester.com to troubleshoot general issues (we usually send clients a mail-tester.com e-mail address to which they send an e-mail for us to get a report). And currently SPF / DKIM / DMARC issues are more relevant, tools like easydmarc.com help to see which outgoing e-mails fail SPF / DKIM / DMARC.

 

[mow]

It would be nice to have the maillog processed and checked for certain problems automatically:

• greylisting problems (reattempt for same mail comes from another ip and is therefore greylisted too, if the domain is not already whitelisted)
• delivery errors due to spf/dkim/dmarc configuration errors (incoming and outgoing)
• mails sent per account, bounces per account (to catch accounts captured by spammers)

with separation of the log incidents (currently, when there's much concurrent traffic, log messages often are interleaved in a hard-to-read way)

 

[Kaspar]

@AYamshanov that sounds like a really resource intensive feature to create. Email is quite a complex topic with many different aspects these days. Ranging from IP reputation, blacklists and spam filtering to DNS related configurations (like SPF, DKIM and DMARC). Each of these aspects impact email usability. For many people these are complex topics. I am no expert on the subject either, but I consider myself skilled enough solve any email issue using the mail logs and in some cases external tools (like mail-tester.com).

Having said that, I really do like the suggestions made by @mow and @Mark_NLD. In particular the suggestion to let customers view the email logs for their domains. That would allow customers to better solve their own email issues (saving server administrators some valuable time and headaches). It's also easier for administrators to view log entries per domain (instead of browsing trough all log entries).

I also feel that the default email delivery failure reports from Postfix are hard to understand for most users. I know that's a Postfix thing and might not even be customizable. But for comparison look how clean and clear the email delivery failure reports are on Gmail or Office/Outlook 365.

Another thing I noticed on the Plesk forums and with my own clients is that quite a few of them are struggling with getting (outbound) email to work properly. Especially with hyperscale providers (like Azure, AWS, DO, ect) as these provider block outbound traffic on port 25. So a Email Provider like SendGrid or Mailgun is needed (or your own external mail server). Which can be daunting to configure for the average user, even with the many tutorials that can be found online. I know that this has been listed as a separate feature called smart hosts (if I am not mistaken) in the Plesk surveys. But I actually think that these two features (mail delivery troubleshooting and smart hosts) are intertwined for many users. Because if users can't get email to work (properly) on their server they are often inclined to use a Email Provider.