Python for Entrepreneurs Transcripts
Chapter: Sending and receiving email
Lecture: Inbound email on your own domain name
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0:02
You are going to want a professional-looking email address for your contact page and for your communications.
0:09
Here on training.talkpython.fm you can contact me, just go to the bottom and click on contact and right here it says all you got to do is
0:17
you can find us on Twitter or send us an email at contact@talkpython.fm. How do we do that? Well, it used to be you could use things like Google Apps
0:27
and just create a free accounts there and set those up as custom domains and that went away a few years ago.
0:33
So, I could setup my own server but I have already gone through this two times, don't set up your own email server, here is the third time,
0:39
don't set up your own email server, I'll show you a service that is amazing for this kind of stuff.
0:45
OK, so I own the domain talkpython.fm and I want to add email to it. There is a great service called Pobox, pobox.com
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and you can come over to Pobox and you can for 35 dollars a year set up custom email routing, rules, spam filters,
1:05
all sorts of stuff on top of your own custom domains. Now you can also pay a little bit more and set up an inbox there
1:13
and do your email there entirely, but I think Gmail is one of the best
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email systems out there these days and so what I do is I just have all the email,
1:21
with various rules redirecting to a host of Gmail aliases and addresses. So think about that, 35 bucks a year
1:33
and you have high quality, properly implemented, no need to worry about it, you don't need to keep it running inbound email.
1:41
I'll take you on a quick tour of my Pobox. So over here, just to show you the pricing for individuals, come down here,
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you can get the full mail system for 50 bucks, or this is what I have, Pobox Plus,
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all I care about forwarding, forwarding up to five different addresses, use your own domain, and you even get an outbound SMTP server
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so I can send mail through basically outbound email and as a reply somebody writes me a message
2:07
to contact@talkpython.fm, I can reply to them and it looks like it's coming from contact@talkpython.fm, but they don't really have a server.
2:15
So that's the service I have, I am logged in over here, you can see I can add a variety of addresses so if I want to add address
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maybe I could do something like support@, these are my various domains,
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talkpython.fm, boom, I hit add and it will tell me which email address do you want to use,
2:35
I could say let's use mikeyckennedy plus talkPythonsupport@gmail, whatever you want, then I can do rules against this, in my Gmail, right.
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I am not going to click this and actually add this but that is how I would do it.
2:50
You can see I've got a bunch of senders, I've got spam filtering turned on, I can blackmail addresses so if some address starts getting spammed a ton
2:59
I can delete that address and tell it to like throw away those emails and so on.
3:05
Basically you just have to set up your mail settings when you add a new domain, so that's easy, they take you through it and so on.
3:13
Over here you can see some stats, I'll just show you some numbers real quick, so apparently this is the email traffic that I had, right,
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this is how many emails I sent or received, so green is delivered, these are held,
3:25
these are spam, I get quite a bit of spam because I publicly list my email address, so obviously it gets spammed like crazy,
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but these guys are pretty good at dropping it and then I forward it to Gmail and they also get rid of the rest of the spam, nothing really bounce,
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maybe one bounce there- no, no bounce, it's all good, and these are the ones I've replied to,
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you can see over here it tells you like those are messages sent to other people through the SMTP server here, right,
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that's me replying to people that sent me messages, over there. Pobox, it's beautiful, you don't have to do anything at all in your server,
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all you have to do is map your domains, MX records, the mail records, to the right settings here that they are going to give you,
4:03
then you set up rules to forward it to where you really care to answer your emails,
4:07
and like in my Gmail, I set up an alias for contact at talkpython.fm so I can even send outbound from Gmail as that and I can also automatically reply
4:17
from that address if somebody sends it to me and so on.