The Staff Email Delivery Screen

The Email delivery screen of the staff Delivery group holds the sending settings of the whole installation: how email leaves Octeth when a user group has no delivery server of its own, where bounces and complaints go, the headers Octeth adds, the seed list and the other install-wide delivery settings. It replaces the classic admin Settings > Email Delivery page.

Screen	Path on a default install	Permission
Email delivery	/user/staff/settings/email-delivery	Settings

Open it from the staff sidebar: click Delivery, then Email delivery. The classic admin Email Delivery sidebar item and the old /app/admin/emaildelivery/ address open the same screen.

Sections

The settings are split into sections in the menu on the left. The open section is part of the address, so you can link to one, for example /user/staff/settings/email-delivery?section=bounces.

• Send method: the send method and its connection, and the test email.
• Bounces: the bounce domain, the soft bounce threshold, forwarding of postmaster mail, failure notifications and the bounce mailbox.
• Complaints and inboxes: the abuse report address, X-Complaints-To, the feedback loop and unsubscribe-by-email addresses, and the feedback loop mailbox.
• Headers: the X-Mailer header and the custom headers added to every email.
• Advanced: the seed list, reply forwarding, relay domains, the pre-header block, the Sender header domain and subscriber snapshots.

Each section has its own Save button and saves only the settings of that section that you changed. If the stored settings changed since you opened the page, for example from another tab, nothing is saved and the screen shows the stored values, so make your change again. When nothing changed, saving says so and sends nothing. If you open another section with unsaved changes, Octeth asks whether to discard them.

INFO

Every save, test email, header added and header removed is recorded in the staff audit log, with the section and the names of the settings involved. Values and passwords are never recorded.

Passwords are never shown

The SMTP password, the Postmark server API token and the two mailbox passwords are write-only. The screen only says whether one is stored.

• Leave the field blank to keep the stored password.
• A stored password is kept only while the server stays the same. If you change the SMTP host, choose another provider, or change a mailbox host, enter the password for the new server. A password is never sent to a different server.
• On an SMTP server that needs no authentication, a new host clears the stored password.

Send method

Choose how email leaves Octeth when a user group has no delivery server of its own:

Method	What you enter
SMTP server	Host, port, encryption (none, SSL or TLS), timeout, and whether the server needs a username and password.
SendGrid	Username (apikey) and the API key. Octeth connects to smtp.sendgrid.net.
Mailgun	The SMTP login of your Mailgun domain and its password. Octeth connects to smtp.mailgun.org.
Amazon SES	The SMTP endpoint of your region (for example email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com) and your SES SMTP credentials. Octeth connects on port 25 with TLS.
Postmark	A server API token, which Postmark takes as both username and password.
PowerMTA pickup directory	The virtual MTA and the pickup directory from your PowerMTA configuration.
Local MTA (sendmail)	The absolute path of the MTA binary, with no arguments, for example /usr/sbin/sendmail.
Save to disk	A directory where each email is written as a file instead of being sent, for testing.

PHP mail() is shown only on an installation that already uses it. The Octeth containers ship no sendmail, so choose another method.

Click Save send method. Saving does not test the connection.

Test email

Send test email sends a test email with the saved settings to the alert recipient of the system settings, the address set on the staff profile screen. Save your changes first: unsaved changes are not tested. If the mail server refuses the email, its answer is shown. Sending a test needs the Delivery servers privilege as well.

Bounces

Setting	What it does
Bounce domain	Bounces are sent to this domain. Its mail server needs a catch-all rule. Required.
Soft bounces before a hard bounce	How many soft bounces turn an address into a hard bounce. Required.
Forward postmaster mail to	Email to abuse@, postmaster@ and root@ of your sender domains is forwarded to this address. Leave it empty to turn forwarding off.
Failure notifications	Emails you when a delivery report cannot be processed.

Bounce mailbox

Turn on Mailbox to have Octeth read delivery reports from an IMAP mailbox, then enter its host, port, username, password and whether it needs SSL. When you save a change to the mailbox while it is on, Octeth signs in to it first, and nothing is saved when that fails: the mail server's answer is shown on the IMAP host field.

See Bounce Processing.

Complaints and inboxes

Setting	What it does
Abuse report address	Abuse reports are sent to this address. Required.
X-Complaints-To	Sent to recipients in the X-Complaints-To header, so use a monitored mailbox. complaints@%sender_domain% follows each sending domain. Required.
Feedback loop address	The address you enrolled in mailbox providers' feedback loop programs.
Unsubscribe by email address	Adds a mailto: fallback to the List-Unsubscribe header. It must reach the bounce mailbox, which processes these requests. Leave it empty for no fallback.

The Feedback loop mailbox works like the bounce mailbox, for spam complaints. See Complaint Processing.

Headers

X-Mailer is the sender identifier in the X-Mailer header of every outgoing email. A user group can override it, and clearing both leaves the header out of campaign email.

Custom headers are added to every email Octeth hands to your MTA, so it can categorise and prioritise them. Click Add header, then enter:

• Header name: letters, digits and -, no spaces or colons, for example X-List-ID.
• Applies to: all emails, campaigns, autoresponders or transactional email.
• Value: one line. Type {{ to list the merge tags of the chosen email type, then keep typing to filter, and press Enter or click one to insert it. Merge tags that do not apply to an email are removed from the value when it is sent.
• Delivery server: every delivery server, or one. Choosing one needs the Delivery servers privilege.

To remove a header, click its delete icon and confirm.

Advanced

Setting	What it does
Seed list	Each address gets a copy of every campaign sent. One address on each line.
Reply forwarding	One alias:forward-to pair on each line, for example *@sender2.com:target2@email.com. Replies to a matching address are forwarded.
Relay domains	The domains the built-in SMTP server relays for. One domain on each line.
Pre-header block	The HTML that carries an email's pre-header text. _PreHeaderText_ is replaced with the text. Use the default fills in the standard block.
Sender header domain	When set, every email carries a Sender header at this domain unless its delivery server enforces a MAIL FROM domain. Leave it empty for no Sender header.
Subscriber snapshot	Keeps a copy of each recipient's data at send time, to personalise the web version later. It slows down queue generation for large lists.

What moved and what did not

• The on-demand SSL domain check address the classic page showed is not on this screen. The bundled reverse proxy reads it from CADDY_DOMAIN_VERIFY_CODE in .oempro_env.
• Delivery servers, which take precedence over the send method for the user groups they are assigned to, are on Managing Delivery Servers in the Staff Area.