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Today I was configuring Jira Service Manager project of Sparxsys where I wanted to create a dedicated project for people/organistions who want to reach out to us for general enquires related to our services. So this is the portal which is now live. All good so far but I also have an email info at sparxsys dot com which I have always and I also have created support at sparxsys dot com dedicated for our support channel.

Now I want to configure support at sparxsys dot com with my support project so I used the in built connector. Follow these steps.

Go to Project | Project settings | Email requests | Connect a custom email account and click on Google.

You will be presented with a screen to authenticate your Google account and give permission to Jira Cloud. This is the tricky part.

There is a check box "Read, compose, and send emails from your Gmail account". You need to make sure this is checked otherwise you will get 403 error reading emails.

Enjoy!

I use Google Suite or whatever it is called these days (Google Enterprise or Google Workspace?) for my company's email. Although I would love to setup my own mail server but setting up an email server is a pain and too much hassle. May be in future. I have this Google Suite legacy free 10 user account so I don't pay for it, too be honest Google mail or Gmail is actually quite good. To create an account for someone is simple and they are up and running in minutes. I am sure in 2022 there is an Open Source email solution with these features, I need to explore. Getting back to the point.

Why am I worrying about my email going to spam?

I moved my sites from webfaction and dreamhost to my own VPS. So I don't use these shared hosting providers anything. I was very happy with their services and for my needs I was happy with a vpsdime, the plan that I have is cheap and good. I pay $7 for 6 GB RAM which is absolutely amazing. I run all my RAM hungry Drupal sites on this server. So long story short, I moved Sparxsys.com to vpsdime but I forgot to do one thing.

There is something called as SPF and DMARC that needs to be setup in your domain DNS settings. This will ensure that your mail is not treated as spam.

Now if you are new to all this then don't worry, I found a site called mail-tester.com, it will give you an email address where you can send a test email.

After sending the email to this test address, press "Then check your score" button.

Finally you will get some score with some suggestions.

For me there were 2 suggestions.

Create an SPF record, which is nothing but a TXT record.

Name: @

Value: "v=spf1 a mx include:_spf.google.com ~all"

Create DMARC record, again a TXT record.

Name: _dmarc

Value: "v=DMARC1; p=reject; rua=mailto:admin@example.com"

Setup DKIM

Follow the instructions here.

And that is it. I hope you enjoyed reading this post.

Enjoy.

Updates

11/01/2022: There is another good service https://www.experte.com/spam-checker which I tried and it will also produce a similar report. I got the followiing email from the developer for this tool.

Like the original, it uses well-known spam filters and blacklists to check the spam score of a mail. But in addition, it also checks whether Gmail classifies the email as spam and into which inbox the mail is placed. Since Gmail is the world's most used email provider, a positive assessment is critical for deliverability. In the last step, the tool also checks the correct configuration of the SPF and DKIM records.

I think it is good to list similar services here, it will help many people.

There are lot of passionate people out there doing wonderful job of sharing there knowledge by making tutorial videos, writing blogs or even helping others on the community. In 2019 I started #ExpertTalks when I asked my good friend to be the first guest on channel and share his wisdom on Cloud computing, but then since 2020 there was a long lockdown here in UK and I was also a bit occupied with work, but I thought I don't have to do this ExpertTalk face to face and I resumed this series online. It makes sense to do it online but whenever possible I will surely do this in person.

In the last couple of months I was able to find time and have done few of those sessions again. I don't want to restrict myself to experts in Atlassian ecosystem but I definitely want to focus first on people who are doing wonderful job already sharing their Atlassian tools knowledge, people come to my channel or this site because they usually want to learn stuff related to Jira or ScriptRunner or other apps. There are already have few sessions lined up but if you want to come on my channel then please reach out to me or message me on linkedin.

There is a personal benefit for me as well by doing this. I don't know about everything. There is so much to learn everyday and if you know me then I am sure you know that I am always looking for ways to expand my knowledge and obviously when I make a video from these talks, you also get to learn a lot. At the same time I want work along with others, it will help everyone. I guess it is human nature that like minded people get together for a common goal.

Ok that's it. Enjoy your day and Happy New Year 2022 :)

Today I upgraded my production site ravisagar.in to the latest recommended Drupal 9.3.0, the site was running on 8.8.2 which was not too far behind but I wanted to not only upgrade my site to 9 but also want to add more features. The current sparxsys.com website is on version 8.6.3 which is a bit old but instead of upgrading it to Drupal 9 I have now other plans.

Well this site has all the videos, blog posts and twitter syndications. It is an integral part of what I do personally and also at Sparxsys so I have decided to move sparxsys.com website to the same codebase. However instead of running both the sites on multisite configuration I will have the same database and shared content. This can be achieved using domain access module in Drupal which is something I did for a client in the past.

If you want to see how I upgraded my Drupal site from 8.8.2 to 9.3.0 you can check my Drupal upgrade runbook. Enjoy. Also life is good these days. Really enjoying the challenge of running own company. Christmas is almost here, weather is obviously not the best but we are used to it now.

I quite enjoyed upgrading the site, although it took me some time to do it but it was fun. I installed and checked Drupal 9 earlier as well but ravisagar.in I think the first big site I moved to Drupal 9, so feeling proud :)

Stay happy

Running a company is not easy, a lot goes into making a company successful. For me it is not new. I was running a company in India and now I just have to repeat those things here in UK. There are so many thing that I need to do, I can think of the following immediate tasks.

• Updating company website, it needs a bit of revamp and Drupal upgrade. I need to mention all the services that we want to offer.
• Make sure I spent regular time in app development. I already have 2 server apps but those needs an update and we need to work on their cloud equivalent.
• Create regular video courses on YouTube.
• Ensure all the company documentation, templates etc. are up to date with UK operations.
• Need to find an accountancy service here in UK.
• Need to promote Sparxsys services in India.

Finally I wanted to say that please subscribe to my YouTube channel and share it with anyone you think can benefit. I have decided to keep my videos and future course always free and because now I can devote a bit more time in making videos so expect some improvements in my content.