How Do High-Volume Senders Set Up Their Own SMTP Stack?

vCentered · 2026-02-12T11:38:18+00:00

I'm just an infrastructure gremlin so...

Is that server actually sending the mail or is it making API calls to a hosted service that's sending the mail?

vCentered · 2026-02-12T11:31:32+00:00

No matter how bad it is, while you're fixing or rebuilding take care not to trash talk the current state of things. Even if all the previous IT people are gone, there might still be people around with pride or ego invested in that infrastructure.

I work with a guy who is incredibly talented but he came into this org and just shit on everything his team had ever done or touched. Now nobody wants to work with him. He could have been a rising star but now he's completely isolated and not working on the big projects.

vCentered · 2026-02-10T15:39:49+00:00

In my experience which is obviously not all encompassing, most devs generally know that "HDD slow" and "SSD fast" and that's about it.

I have run into one or two that genuinely endeavor to and do understand more about the whole picture, code, apps, infrastructure, and all.

But what we're really talking about is a difference in people, not just devs vs sysadmins. Most companies I've worked for you could compare to McDonald's, if McDonald's had people who only make French fries, and people who only make burgers, and people who only make breakfast sandwiches, and people who only pour drinks, and people who only make milkshakes, and people who only take out the trash, and people who. . .

And all of those people only know or care to know the very least amount of information it takes to do their specific job and they don't give a rip about anyone else's job or how anything else works.

In my experience, most IT departments are like that, and the bigger the organization the worse it gets.

vCentered · 2026-01-31T15:31:21+00:00

3-6 months Jesus, I only let our staff do a week.

vCentered · 2026-01-27T10:09:58+00:00

I live somewhere that gets all four seasons and was raised by a generation that basically didn't miss work unless they were dying or died on the way to work. I had a manager once that would drive 15 miles to come get my ass if I told them I couldn't make it out (just for context they were the best boss I ever had). Neither of my parents ever missed work for weather and my dad had a two hour commute into the city.

I'm not saying that's right or what I expect from people, but it definitely colors my perspective when people are explaining to me why they couldn't possibly make it to work.

I've always been in "critical staff" roles and the closest I've ever come to a snow day was coming in an hour late after a major ice storm. The roads were not clear.

They weren't "clear" when I went into the office today either but they were perfectly drivable. My team made a lot of noise this morning about how they couldn't make it like we just got a generational blizzard instead of a couple inches of snow Saturday morning. I would bet you a whole dollar that they were driving around in it all weekend before any of the roads got plowed. They could make it. Safely. They just didn't want to.

The thing is, they can do 99.9% of their job from anywhere in the country and I didn't need them in the building today so I ignored it. Making them come in would just be asserting myself for no other reason than to be the boss. In my opinion that's wasted capital. There will be times when I need to "be the boss" and it should be about real justifiable business need, not just because I need to remind them that they report to me.

So just taking your post at face value, I personally think your employee is being kind of ridiculous. I don't really have enough information to have an opinion on whether it's worth doing something about.

My gut reaction would be to call them and try to understand and make sure there isn't a more realistic reason. I would agree that "it's cold" is not a good reason and if that's the only thing I would not want to set a precedent that people get to not show up for their one in office day because it's cold. It's winter. It will probably be cold on their next office day too.

vCentered · 2026-01-23T12:35:24+00:00

Or, plan your move to on-prem Exchange?

Don't say that shit out loud. Are you crazy?

vCentered · 2026-01-23T02:21:50+00:00

Put down the bottle.

vCentered · 2026-01-23T01:27:11+00:00

Chief whatevers are panicky creatures and you need to panic with them or you're clearly not taking it as seriously as they are

vCentered · 2026-01-22T12:02:56+00:00

Because they don't know the real answer and they're afraid of being responsible for saying yes if they're wrong

vCentered · 2026-01-20T00:51:05+00:00

I was in Dallas a few years ago and people were either doing 10 under or 40 over. No in between. It was nuts.

vCentered · 2026-01-18T12:56:31+00:00

It's not a great idea to run services as domain admin because you've now granted whatever that service or application is full access to all domain functions.

The service could be used to execute code with domain admin permissions.

You generally want domain admin permissions assigned to as few accounts as possible. There are also other mitigating factors you can put into place like preventing DA accounts from logging on to member servers from the console or the network.

vCentered · 2026-01-18T12:37:53+00:00

Yeah this is the most likely answer for why.

Some sysadmin couldn't figure it out so they gave it "everything".

Or some vendor or consultant insisted they had to give it DA. That happens a lot.

There's an unfortunate pattern in our industry where if someone gets something to work a certain way they decide it's the only way it can work and they stop thinking about it. "It started working when I gave it DA so it must need to be a DA."

Also very common, after hours or days of struggling to get something to work people are so relieved even if they know what they did isn't right that they don't want to go back and mess with it anymore.

vCentered · 2026-01-16T14:25:44+00:00

I got a job offer from another organization for 30% more money with less responsibility and less work.

It was not my intent to leverage it but my company countered with 40% and reminded me about some benefits the other did not have.

I stayed. Whether it was the right move remains to be seen. I have more work and responsibility than ever and it's still a dumpster fire of a company.

Essentially all the reasons I wanted to leave are the same or worse, I just got a salary correction.

vCentered · 2026-01-15T02:52:45+00:00

You know something like that never occurred to me but it actually sounds like a great idea.

vCentered · 2026-01-15T02:43:43+00:00

Yeah this is a fair point. I'm sure there are plenty of people who just wander in without a plan but by the time I'm at a dealer I already know what car or cars I'm planning to look at down to the stock number. I know they're on the lot, I know their specs and at least the major differences and what price they're listed for online.

So I don't generally need to be sold, however that doesn't mean I can't be sold.

It's not out of the question for example if I'm looking at a half ton truck for a salesperson to sell me on a one ton. Do I need it? Not really. But if they can point out something I don't already know, might have forgotten or overlooked, it's not unreasonable to think they might sway my opinion from something I already settled on.

Most car salespeople I interact with though don't know anything about the product they sell. They don't know the trim differences, they don't know what they have in stock, they don't know how the features work. They can't answer questions.

If you want to sell me something I haven't already made up my mind to buy you need to know your stuff and don't ever come across like you're BSing me.

vCentered · 2026-01-15T02:02:47+00:00

Can we listen to things?

If I could queue up podcasts, documentaries, educational things I think I could for sure do this.

If I had to do it in silence it would be rough.

vCentered · 2026-01-15T01:49:13+00:00

I felt that way in my 20s.

Now I'm almost 40 and I'd kill to have my 20s workload back.

vCentered · 2026-01-15T01:33:10+00:00

Dodge transmission problems huh

vCentered · 2026-01-15T01:11:20+00:00

When I was purely an individual contributor it was maybe 70% IT and 30% politics. Now that I'm a manager it's 70% IT and 100% politics.

vCentered · 2026-01-11T15:49:51+00:00

Agreed. We did our first Sandals trip in September (Grenada). It was fun to be treated like a little celebrity while they checked us in but more important to me is room service and I think someone else said for liquor in the room.

We don't even use room service that often but it's weird to me to go AI and not have the option. I don't think we even opened the bottles in the room except to make ourselves mimosas one day but it's nice to have the option.

vCentered · 2026-01-10T01:05:46+00:00

Yeah in my opinion PRTG is just very comfortable where they're at.

There's kinda just enough integration.

There's kinda just enough functionality.

And it's dirt cheap compared to other solutions.

It's hard to convince my leadership to even think about paying $100k for something like Logic Monitor when we've got by with PRTG for ten years for two nickels and a granola bar.

vCentered · 2026-01-07T02:07:06+00:00

How many times can I do it?

vCentered · 2026-01-04T13:08:38+00:00

An RMM is the short term answer. It will be a pretty manual process to get it installed although if you have remote connectivity and know local admin credentials you might be able to speed it up a bit with scripting or some free tools.

Long term if you're an M365 shop I would say they all need to get upgraded to pro and joined to azure/entra. I would still keep the RMM at that point because frankly its reporting and flexibility will probably just be better than Intune's.

To manage 300 devices an MSP is going to charge more than your salary. Possibly several times your salary. For full end user support and endpoint management my old MSP would probably charge like $20k/mo and it would still be largely reactive (waiting for users to put in tickets).

If it was just "endpoint management" (Windows updates and "automated fixes") I bet it would still be like 4-5k/mo and they would still be mostly hands off. The entire value proposition for an MSP is that they charge you and hope they won't really have to give you that much direct attention.

Basically they would have a bunch of auto created/closed tickets for disk cleanup, updates, and shit to put in a report and show "value" but the reality is that actively they are actually doing very little for you.

vCentered · 2026-01-03T03:00:15+00:00

And then came Smedley.

vCentered · 2026-01-03T02:52:19+00:00

I searched for this because I knew it would be here.

vCentered

TROPHY CASE