Gateway connection

If you need to process corporate emails before they reach your employees' mailboxes, you can use a mail gateway.

Why you might need it

For example, you can use a gateway to connect a third-party anti-spam solution. This setting also lets you create a hybrid mail setup: host some users' mailboxes on your internal server (like Exchange), others in Yandex Mail. In this case, an incoming email first comes to your internal server. If there's a suitable mailbox on it, the email goes into it. If at least one of the recipients of the email is missing on the server, it's forwarded to Yandex Mail.

To do this, you need to forward the email to the gateway and then send it to Yandex Mail.
Note that if the gateway is configured, all emails, including emails between employees, newsletters, and so on, are routed through it.

How to set up a gateway

Tip

This section provides an overview of the basic principle, not a detailed step-by-step instruction. The exact steps will depend on your specific needs and objectives.

If you don't know how to set up mail gateways yet, use the default configuration without a gateway.

  1. Change the MX record of your domain to point to the gateway.

  2. On the gateway side create a rule for forwarding incoming mail to the DNS record mx.yandex.net.

  3. If necessary, add the gateway address to the whitelist (see the explanation and instructions in the next section).

If a third-party anti-spam solution is running on the gateway

In this case, you need to add a specific header to emails identified as spam. When receiving an email from the gateway with such a header, Yandex Mail will place it in the Spam folder in the user's mailbox.

Set up the gateway to add the header X-Yandex-ExternalGate-Spam: YES to unwanted emails when they are forwarded to Yandex Mail.

Whitelist of incoming mail sources

You can whitelist the address of your gateway or another server. After this, the mail coming from this source won't be checked by Spamoborona. This can be useful in the following cases:

  • You use a third-party service for spam protection and fully trust it.

  • You've configured a hybrid system: some mailboxes are located on your internal mail server, which then forwards the emails it can't process to Yandex Mail.

  • You're booking a simulated phishing attack to test if your employees are ready to resist malicious actors.

Tip

We don't recommend disabling the Spamoborona protection, even if you're confident in your third-party security solution.

How to whitelist an address

You can whitelist an address only via the API.

The list may include both specific IP addresses (such as 77.88.21.249) and entire subnets (such as 77.88.54.0/23 or 2a02:6b8::/32).

To manage the list, use requests from the "Anti-spam list" group. For more information on requests, see the Yandex 360 API documentation.

Profile images don't appear when the gateway is connected

If you have a mail gateway configured, the domain's MX record points to it, not to the Yandex server. Because of this, the profile images of Yandex accounts won't be displayed in messages from employees with accounts on your company domain.

Yandex technology designed to combat spam.

The type of DNS record used to determine the mail processing server. When a sender tries to send an email to an address corresponding to a given domain name, the DNS server uses an MX record to determine which server to send the email to.

API is a special mechanism for managing Yandex 360 services, designed primarily for process automation. There are two ways to work with the API: create a special application (which can be done by a developer) or use the computer's command line. Complete documentation for developers.