I have sent out 5 different edm with different content to a group of people. 4 of them could reach the mailbox of yahoo, gmail and hotmail successfully.
The problem is that the remaining 1 being flagged as SPAM by hotmail. (It can reach the mailbox of yahoo and gmail successfully)
Does anyone know why?
This can be down to a number things.
If you sent the emails out quite quickly then the receiving email server may just flag it as spam.
The other thing that it could be is that you are using a phrase that the hotmail spam filter is picking up on. I suggest running your email through something like spamassassin to see what it would score.
If its still got a good score then maybe you need to be affiliated with the hotmail feedback loop so that they can let you know when someone hits "This is spam" button.
IF that doesnt work then you may need to see if your IP address has been blocked by hotmail. If you want to do email direct marketing, the IP address normally has to be whitelisted by the email provider and potentially spamhaus so they know you aren't a spammer.
Related
I'm using my own email server to send and receive my emails. Therefor I've set up a VPS at Tilaa.com which also acts as my webserver.
On the webserver I have DirectAdmin setup which takes care of my administrative things.
The problem is that I can receive and send emails but Outlook, Live and Hotmail refuse the receive any emails coming from my email server. Gmail does work f.e. ( Not even in junk folders )
When the receiver at Outlook/live or hotmail adds my email address to the safe list, emails do get through.
My domain is virtualfarmingworld.com
What I have done?
- Setup SPF record
- Setup DKIM record
- Setup A record mail.virtualfarmingworld.com to server IP 84.22.113.42
http://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=mx%3avirtualfarmingworld.com&run=toolpage#
Does anyone have any ideas?
Regards,
Ciryk Popeye
Ciryk,
Hotmail can be a bit tricky, if it's being blocked completely. Then most likely your IP is on their internal blacklist. If it's showing up in their SPAM folder it can be a number of reason. The headers from the email in Hotmail will tell you why it's in the SPAM folder.
Look for SRV:<value> PCL: <Value> and SCL: <Value>
PCL stands for Phising Confidence Level and SCL stands for Spam Confidence Level.
You should run your email through this Mail Tester, it really does point out a lot of issues. It may or may not solve the hotmail issue, but they have this inbox tester their that really awesome that will show you other places you're having issues mailing to. Keep in mind, the previous owner of the IP might of spammed from it and caused issues.
I also notice by helping a lot of people that after signing up to Microsoft Junk Mail Reporting System, wait a few days and then delivery results are better with hotmail. I did a scan on you IP and I think you did that already signed up?
You're also on this blacklist: http://www.dnsblchile.org/
Which is really easy to get off, normally takes a couple of hours after you filled out the form.
I am trying to send mails with mailgun. My DNS config (SPF,DKIM) seems to be ok and are being validated in mailgun service. I can send mail to several users with gmail, live and most others mail providers. However, I have a problem when I sent an email for email accounts of my university.
The message is rejected with the following alert:
"554 5.7.1 : Client host rejected: MX-CIDR"
My current DNS settings are:
TXT # "v=spf1 include:mailgun.org ~all"
MX 10 mxa.mailgun.org.
MX 10 mxb.mailgun.org.
DKIM was validated as well. I checked my domain at mxtoolbox and the dns config pass in all tests. I did not find errors related with that alert in others questions. May someone help me to fix it?
Update 1:
Just some more informations:
1) I dont send, and I have absolutely no intention to send spam. I created an educational website, used by students and instructors, and they send messages sometimes between each others. I also send mail to confirm registers, recovery password, as a lot of others websites do. I only send messages to people who was agreed with my terms of service, that includes the information about my mail policy. It is a small service, I never sent more than 2,000 messages in a month (I have 800 registered users so far)
2) I do not believe I was blacklisted, mxtools verify several blacklists databases and my IP have passed in all verifications. Also, the server is not rejecting all messages from my IP, I can send messages with my personal email with the same domain, but I use different services to handle my personal inbox with my domain and the emails send by my website. So, I guess it may be a DNS record mistake.
3) I only use mailgun (or others transactional email services like mandrill or sendgrid) because it is highly recommended (and easy). I use a small VPS and it is hard to configure my own email service (I am a programmer, I am not an expert in that kind of configuration). If exists negative factors about the use of these systems, I really like to know and learn more.
I see no evidence posted that the reason the receiving mail server is rejecting your mail is because of your SPF records.
There isn't even any evidence here that the receiving mail servers are even performing SPF checks on their incoming mail.
Can you explain why exactly you believe that this has anything to do with SPF?
Just because someone's rejecting your mail, and you happen to be messing around with your SPF records, doesn't mean that the reason for your mail being rejected is due to your SPF records.
The only ones who can tell you exactly why your email is being rejected, and what needs to be done to fix it, is the receiving mail servers' administrators, and that's who you should be asking. They are the only ones who know exactly how their mail servers are configured, and how they work. Unless it's evident from the text of the error message, and it's not, anyone else's answer will be nothing but guesswork.
And actually my guess would be that, if anything, the error message seems to suggest that they have simply blacklisted your IP address range, period, for whatever reason. I would interpret "MX-CIDR" as meaning "MX's IP address' (you can Google what "CIDR" means by yourself); i.e.: sending mail server's IP address is explicitly blacklisted from sending them mail.
Now, taking from the referenced domain's web site, I quote:
"Our software automatically manages the delivery process to give your emails the best chance of landing in the inbox."
I would think that the only type of folks who would be concerned about having "the best chance of landing in" someone inbox would be all the typical spamming parasites. I browsed through the referenced website, and I couldn't shake off a slimy feeling I get after typically wandering into a typical spam spewer.
Is this domain being used to send spam?
If so, then you probably know the answer to your question, already.
Certain SPF libraries might reject emails when trying to perform a reverse lookup on the domain that you're sending from.
They usually get this from the MX records attached to the domain and if there's a mismatch it'll fail out with a rejection (more detail here: http://www.zytrax.com/books/dns/ch9/spf.html).
It's usually only a problem if the receiving server is not necessarily configured correctly, or is being super harsh on incoming mail due to an overwhelming amount of spam.
I created event registration web sites (you can imagine something like http://www.eventbrite.com/), which allow users to subscribe for event updates. When subscribed, we send mass emails (with the same content) to those users.
It was ok before, but recently I noticed that GMail always put the email into Spam folder.
As any texts would always go to Spam folder, I suspect that my domain was blacklisted by Gmail.
1) Is there a way to request google to put my domain into the whitelist?
2) Let's say it can't and I decide to register for new domain.
Is there a way to avoid the mass email to be marked as spam by Gmail? (may be something like what Facebook email notification do?)
Yes, don't send mass email :-) If you really want to avoid being considered a spammer, send out emails with less recipients, and don't swamp the mail server with them. Let's say, for example, you have thirty recipients for a given update. You can send out emails with one recipient every minute for a half hour.
Now the numbers may be different (and will of course depend on the success of your site) but the basic theory will stand up for quite a while.
As to how to get yourself whitelisted in GMail, that's really up to the recipient. They can usually do it by simply adding your email address to their contact list.
Keep in mind whitelisting there refers to individual GMail accounts, GMail itself does not whitelist IP addresses.
It does blacklist them if you misbehave but that generally means you get delivery rejects when trying to send. The fact that your messages are going in to the mail system and being delivered to spam folders indicates that this is an account-based thing, not a global GMail blacklisting of your IP/domain.
In any case, the place to report problems for GMail delivery problems is here.
As a school, we send out mass emails to our parents about events and issues. There's no way we have the time to spend sending out one email per minute. What we did was sign up with AOL as a business account, and we are allowed to do "bulk mailings" until they get multiple complaints. However, gmail clients usually have to list us as a valid sender or else those emails end up in spam folders. Works the same for clients using college alumni accounts from edu addresses. Gmail is the only one who regularly gives us this problem for our recipients on their email servers. We let parents know at orientation that they will have to specifically admit our emails via some setting on gmail.
Let say I have a website that allows users to send articles on that website to a friend.
The way it works is that when the "send to a friend" link is clicked a form appears and it allows users to fill in the details and an email is sent to their friend.
The user can put in a "from" email address and a "to" email address into this form and a small amount of content.
When the email is received the from email address appears in the FROM and REPLY TO.
This website also sends a great deal of its own email communications to its users.
My question is:
Is there risk to allowing users (bots, attacks etc) to use this application to send emails from my SMTP, and how great is the risk?
My assumption is yes, this is not ideal.
Is it possibly worse than "not ideal"?
I do not know about bots using your form. Should it be a problem? I don't know.. I do know they program bots to be pretty clever, using your custom forms and all.
I do know that some email servers check if the FROM email address has the same IP address as the IP the mail was sent from. So imagine I put in my hotmail email address, and the mail server sees your server, it might flag the email as spam.
In the past I've an e-card websystem. It was a small joint venture with a girl I knew. She created the (cute) cards and I build her an e-card system. The website was pretty simple. Select card, enter email address, placing senders email address in the FROM and sent the email that you would have received an e-card.
Life was good...
Until I found that my entire web server IP was blacklisted at three major spam filtering mechanisms. And that 15% of all email recipients who used to receive e-cards from my site, would not receive their e-cards, because all my emails were blacklisted as spam from the get go. We have receive many many emails from angry "customers" demanding that their e-cards did not arrive. (I still find it funny how some people demanded the service, especially since it was a free service, go figure). My automatic reminder function was telling them the e-card still were not viewed, and they perhaps mistyped the email address, so that might have ticked them off :P
It was pretty annoying for my other customers as well, since they relied on sending out played newsletters and such and calling me that over 20% of the customers did not receive the newsletters.
Sending e-mails is hard. You should also check out Jeff's blog about this. So, learn from my mistake, and please put an email address associated with your email server in the FROM. This will spare you a lot of headaches ;)
yes this is definitely not ideal if this is a public website that any bot can access. but there are easy ways for you to limit spam use.
have your code limit any email
address to send ~50 emails a day and
only ~10 an hour based on your
needs. a bot would probably try to
send a million at once so limit them
on an hourly and daily basis.
store every email communication in a
database and come up with a good
program to monitor the most active
email senders. if you can verify
that an email is trusted, then let
them send as many emails as they
want
think about this site itself, it has very defined actions and reputation guidelines that limit you until you have proved you are trusted.
It may depend on whether you do any authentication to determine who's allowed to send emails. If the user has to be logged in to send articles, then you're probably fine. Bots will fail because they'll never be logged in.
The risk will increase the greater traffic you get to your site, and yes it's probably less than ideal. Unprotected, a bot will inevitably find your unprotected form, and start sending emails from your server.
There are some pretty easy solutions though, the most common probably being to implement something like Captcha
Fairly safe. I assume you do check the "From" address, if only by sending it one (standard!) mail first and asking the owner of that email address to confirm they are really humans ? This prevents most bots from finding and abusing your form. Of course, a directed attack with a human responding to your verification email will still allow spamming. But you've got a much better trail if you have received at least one reply from the alleged "From" address.
However, I don't think this will work reliably. The introduction of techniques like SPF will mean that mails from "example.com" will only be accepted if they originate from an outgoing SMTP server in the *.example.com domain. If you're faking emails with From: addresses #example.com, the receiving SMTP server will see that you are in fact not part of *.example.com and reject the email - and probably blacklist your IP range for good measure.
I sent 3 emails last week as replies from our website. None received them! One was yahoo, hotmail and an overseas domain. I am wondering if it's not a good idea to open a yahoo account with our domain name as the user just to reply to prospective buyers.
Your mail server's IP may have been black listed. This is common on shared servers.
http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
First, check dnsbl.info to see if your mailserver's IP is blocked by any of the blacklists. If they are, contact the blacklist administrator to investigate removing the block.
If your email is business critical, then you need to get a dedicated server with a white-hat hosting company, control over DNS to set up your SPF/SenderID record, and to register with the Hotmail, AOL and Yahoo postmasters for whitelisting and feedback loops. Most of these will only accept requests for dedicated servers, where you have 100% control over the email they send.
If you are using an online contact form, make people double-enter their email address and check the entries match - otherwise you'll have no end of typos, which are naturally undeliverable and frustrating for both you and your customers.
You could also try looking at gmail for domains. It's what I use and so far I haven't had a problem withany spam filters. Also make sure that you are not writing the content of the message to where a spam filter could flag it as spam. There's some guides on the net somewhere. I found out that by removing the word "free" from the message the emails started going though (before I was on gmail).