Using SparkPost with PowerMTA

If you’re interested in relaying mail through PowerMTA to SparkPost, there are only a few things you need to do. First, create a SparkPost account if you don’t already have one.

Next, create an API key with the "Send via SMTP" permission:

Now create and verify the domain you want to use for sending. The setup process should take about 5-10 minutes if you have access to your DNS server. See Verify Sending Domains for more information.

Add the following to your PowerMTA config, changing the value for auth-password to the SparkPost API key you created above:

<domain sparkpost.rollup>
 use-unencrypted-plain-auth yes
 auth-username SMTP_Injection
 auth-password xxxxxxxx
 route smtp.sparkpostmail.com:587
 use-starttls yes
 require-starttls yes
 max-smtp-out 10
</domain>

<domain *>
 queue-to sparkpost.rollup
</domain>

Two great benefits of using PowerMTA to relay to SparkPost are you don’t need to change your existing architecture, and PowerMTA handles all the queueing and any network issues that might arise during delivery.You also get the excellent built in metrics that are part of SparkPost.

# Selecting which domains to send through SparkPost

The <domain *> directive shown above causes all mail to be sent to SparkPost. More realistically, you will want to migrate gradually, by selecting which traffic streams go to SparkPost, and which ones are delivered by PMTA as before. With PMTA, you can select based on the MAIL FROM domain (known as the sending domain in SparkPost).

In your PMTA configuration, include a pattern-list into the source directive that receives your incoming messages. For example:

# Settings per source IP address (for incoming SMTP connections)
<source 127.0.0.1>
    always-allow-relaying yes   # allow feeding from 127.0.0.1
    process-x-virtual-mta yes   # allow selection of a virtual MTA
    max-message-size unlimited
    smtp-service yes            # allow SMTP service
    pattern-list domainsRelayedToSparkPost
</source>

Then set up the pattern-list to match each MAIL FROM domain using a regex. This domain must be sendable by SparkPost, i.e. registered as a valid sending domain. Don’t add a trailing $ (matching end-of-line) to the regex target, because then it would not match addresses that are surrounded by < > brackets.

# SparkPost injection, conditional on the sending domain (mailfrom address) using the following
# pattern.  This pattern should be included in your active <source> directive(s).
<pattern-list domainsRelayedToSparkPost>
    mail-from /@email.mydomain.com/ virtual-mta=SparkPostRelay
</pattern-list>

Next, we set up a virtual-mta to handle this traffic with your chosen name. In the example below, it’s called SparkPostRelay.

<virtual-mta SparkPostRelay>
    <domain *>
        queue-to {sparkpost}
    </domain>
</virtual-mta>

The {sparkpost} directive is a short way to get the needed configuration, instead of giving all the details in the <domain sparkpost.rollup> directive in the first example. We can also select a particular SparkPost dedicated IP pool by name. See PMTA User Guide section 3.3.20 "SparkPost Traffic Redirection Support".

<domain {sparkpost}>
    auth-password ###YOUR API KEY HERE###           # generate under Account/API Keys
    sparkpost-ip-pool test                          # if you want to select a specific SparkPost IP pool
</domain>