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Note: This post will cover info more about openstack networking configuration assuming customer already have an email marketing server.

Background:

At present email is playing a vital role in this communication world, so when we need to send emails we may not considering to have our own email setup rather we use public free email providers like Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo..etc.; but when we need to send bulk emails for any of our promotion or marketing activity even then can we use this free email providers ? It is completely depends up on what is the number we are referring the term “bulk” !

For some people they may have requirement to send emails 10’s , 100’s , for others may be 1000’s it all depends on how big is our lead list/source, So for all our needs we may not be able to use free email providers, here is the comprehensive list of email providers and their limitations.

For our bulk email requirements we may choose any marketing agency our we may out SMTP service providers , rather if we want to build our own email server for marketing purpose, we may feel what is difference between general email server and marketing email server, In general regular email setup is easy by using Microsoft exchange or even we can opensource sendmail to setup but for marketing email server need little more specific config, because while you are sending 1000’s of email at same time from same public IP then there is lot of chance to become your public IP black listed then most of the email scanners will mark your email as spam. and we know how many people read spam emails 👶

Now we know why most of our inboxes have lot of spam ✋

Solution Overview

For one of my Techclyde (Where I am working) customer who is into Digital marketing services, where their existing digital marketing Applications and email servers were in their our private datacenter powered by VMware, to align with their cloud roadmap and other factors (open secret “cost”) Customer decided to migrate to private cloud powered by Openstack.

Techclyde had involved in in its own delivery model to provide cutting edge solution and services to the customer.

After successful migration then customer had a new requirement for their new business line which is email marketing, then customer requested us to evaluate possibilities to set up email marketing server with all the best practices, we were able to cover all the required best practices apart from the requirement to have multiple public IP address for single instance.

This is where we have given different solutions for our customer:

As we know in openstack we cannot directly assign multiple floating IP’s to single interface.

Reason :Floating ip addresses are implemented as NAT rules on the neutron router, and it doesn’t make sense to have multiple NAT rules with the same fixed ip address but different floating addresses.

So we have to add another fixed ip to our instance to assign other floating IP, even here to have isolated environment from existing applications we have created separate project in openstack and created multiple private networks in it and associated each one of the private IP to an instance, so that our instance will have different private networks associated with different floating IP’s. By this now our customer is rocking on their new business line with effective cost along with more security and scalability.

Technical Details: