An authenticated outgoing mail server for the systems that have to send email but were never meant to deliver it: your ERP, your point of sale, your website forms, your WordPress store, the scanner in the corridor. They sign in over TLS, hand the message to a relay in Riyadh, and the relay does the delivering — from dedicated addresses that carry transactional mail only.
Opened by request. No checkout and no public price list yet — tell us what you send and we will set you up.
Nobody goes looking for an SMTP relay on a good day. They go looking after one of these:
The cause is nearly always the same. The message was sent by a machine that has no business delivering mail: a web server on a shared address with a poor history, a PHP mail() call with no signature, an ERP box behind an office internet line whose address changes. Receiving providers look at where the message came from, find no SPF match, no DKIM signature and no reputation, and make the sensible decision.
A relay fixes the origin. Your system stops delivering and starts submitting: it signs in to one known server and hands the message over. Everything the receiving side judges — the sending address, the signature, the DNS alignment, the retry behaviour — becomes the relay's job.
Mail written by people in mailboxes and mail generated by systems behave differently, and they fail differently. A person sends a few dozen messages a day to people who know them. A billing run sends several hundred near-identical messages in two minutes. We keep those on separate lanes with separate sending addresses, so that a misbehaving script on the application side cannot damage the reputation that your staff's everyday correspondence depends on — and the other way round.
For most of the last decade a Saudi company that needed a relay rented one in Europe or the United States, because that is where the relay services were. It works. It also means that every invoice, every one-time password and every scanned contract crosses the world to a queue in another jurisdiction before it turns round and comes back to a recipient two streets away in Olaya.
| Question | Relay abroad | Relay in Riyadh |
|---|---|---|
| Where is the message queued? | In the provider's region, outside the Kingdom | In Riyadh, until it is handed to the recipient's provider |
| The submission leg | Your system connects across continents for every message | A short network path from anything running in the Kingdom — noticeable for devices and chatty applications |
| Who you talk to when mail stops | A ticket queue, usually English only | A team in Riyadh, in Arabic or English, in your working hours |
| Fit with a data-residency policy | An exception you have to document | Consistent with keeping systems and their data in the Kingdom |
On the Personal Data Protection Law: transactional email is full of personal data — names, phone numbers, invoice lines, sometimes ID numbers. If your organisation has decided to keep personal data inside Saudi Arabia wherever it can, an outgoing mail queue abroad is an easy item to miss. Moving it to Riyadh closes that gap. We are not your legal adviser and this page is not legal advice; how PDPL applies to you is a question for your own compliance team. See data residency in Saudi Arabia for the wider picture.
Add our include to the SPF record your domain already has. If you have no SPF record, this is the whole record:
v=spf1 include:_spf.alskyline.com ~all
If you already send through another provider, keep theirs and add ours beside it — a domain must have exactly one SPF record, not two:
v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com include:_spf.alskyline.com ~all
This is deliberate. Providers that hand customers a list of IP addresses to paste into SPF create a future outage: the day an address changes, every customer who did not update their DNS starts failing SPF. With an include, the list lives on our side.
We generate a DKIM key for each domain you send from and give you one DNS record to publish. From then on the relay signs every message as your domain, which is what lets a receiving provider verify that the message was not altered and really is from you.
DMARC tells receivers what to do when SPF and DKIM do not line up with the visible From address. Begin with p=none and a reporting address, read the reports for a few weeks to find every system that sends as your domain (there is always one nobody remembered), then tighten to quarantine and later reject. We help you read the alignment results; the pace is yours.
| Setting | Value |
|---|---|
| Server | The relay hostname issued with your access |
| Port and encryption | 587 with STARTTLS, or 465 with SSL/TLS |
| Authentication | Required — the username and password issued with your access |
| From address | An address on a domain you have set up with us, for example billing@yourcompany.sa |
That is the same handful of fields whether you are filling in an SMTP plugin in WordPress, the outgoing-mail screen of an ERP, the MAIL_* lines of a Laravel .env file, or the network menu of a multifunction printer.
| System | Typical mail | What to watch |
|---|---|---|
| ERP and accounting | Invoices, statements, purchase orders, payslips | Send from a real, monitored address so replies and bounces reach a person |
| POS and ordering systems | Receipts, end-of-day reports, low-stock alerts | Month-end bursts — tell us the peak so your daily limit fits it |
| Websites and web apps | Contact forms, sign-up confirmations, password resets, one-time codes | Protect forms against bots; a spammed form sends spam in your name |
| WordPress and WooCommerce | Order confirmations, account mail, form plugins | Use an SMTP plugin instead of the default PHP mail function |
| Printers and scanners | Scan to email | Firmware must support SMTP authentication and current TLS |
| Servers and monitoring | Cron output, backup reports, uptime alerts | An alert storm can exhaust a daily limit; rate-limit at the source |
The relay is offered to Skyline Cloud customers — it sits beside Skyline business email for your staff mailboxes, and it is the natural outgoing server for sites on Skyline web hosting and for applications on a VPS in Riyadh or a cloud server. Your system does not have to run with us to use it, but you do need a Skyline account.
A relay is only as good as the reputation of the addresses it sends from, and reputation is shared: everyone on the relay benefits from it and anyone can spend it. So the rules are part of the product, not small print.
| Accepted | Refused |
|---|---|
| Invoices, receipts, statements, quotations | Newsletters and promotional campaigns |
| Password resets, one-time codes, account notices | Any mail to purchased, rented or scraped lists |
| Order, booking and delivery confirmations | Cold outreach sequences and lead-generation tools |
| System alerts, reports, scan-to-email | Reselling the relay to third parties |
If your business sends marketing email — many good businesses do — use a platform built for it, with unsubscribe handling and consent records, and keep it on a separate sending path from your invoices. We would rather tell you that on this page than after you have signed up.
We can give you a clean origin; we cannot make a receiving provider like your message. Use a From address that exists and is read. Keep the visible From domain the same as the domain you set up for DKIM. Remove addresses that bounce instead of retrying them for months. Do not send a PDF with no body text and a one-word subject. None of this is exotic, and together it is most of the difference between the inbox and the junk folder.
It is an outgoing mail server that your application, website or device signs in to and hands its messages to, so that the relay — not your web server, ERP machine or office printer — is the system that actually delivers them to Gmail, Outlook and everyone else.
From dedicated sending addresses hosted in Riyadh. The message is accepted in Riyadh, queued in Riyadh and sent onward from Riyadh, so the relay leg of the journey stays inside the Kingdom. The recipient's own mail provider may of course be anywhere in the world.
Two things. Add include:_spf.alskyline.com to your domain's SPF record, and publish the DKIM record we issue for your domain. We also recommend a DMARC record, starting in monitoring mode. If we add or retire sending addresses later, the SPF include follows them automatically and you do not touch your DNS again.
Port 587 with STARTTLS, or port 465 with TLS from the first byte. Both require a username and password. There is no unauthenticated relaying and no plain-text sign-in, so the client, plugin or device has to support SMTP authentication over TLS.
No. The relay is for transactional and operational mail only: invoices, password resets, order confirmations, alerts, scans, system notifications. Marketing and bulk mail are not accepted, and every account has a daily sending limit. That rule is the reason the addresses stay clean for everyone who uses them.
Most multifunction devices with a "scan to email" feature will, provided the firmware supports SMTP authentication and a current TLS version. Very old devices that can only send without encryption will not connect. If you are unsure, tell us the model when you request access and we will check with you.
There is no public price list yet and it is not sold through a checkout. Access is opened by request so that we can confirm what you send and set a sensible daily limit first. Tell us what you need to send and from which system, and we will come back to you.
No, and you should be cautious of anyone who does. Inbox placement is decided by the receiving provider, based on your domain's reputation and the content you send as much as on the sending address. What we do control — clean, monitored addresses, correct SPF and DKIM, separate lanes and a strict no-marketing rule — we do properly.
Send us the system, the sending domain and a rough daily volume. We will tell you plainly whether the relay fits, and if it does, issue your access and walk through the DNS records with you — in Arabic or English.
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