Confirmation emails always end up in spam box

[Michael J]

Hi all,

I have a hostgator VPS account with primary domain primarydomain.com. Under that domain, i created another cPanel account for a sibling domain called siblingdomain.com. The primarydomain.com account is for personal use and siblingdomain.com is where i have xenforo installed (and what i'm trying to get to work! ).

Now, whatever i do - SMTP (using primarydomain and siblingdomain credentials), default (with and without the -f option), SPF enabled, DKIM enabled... i just cannot get a confirmation email to land in a normal inbox - testing is using gmail and hotmail email accounts.

If i look at the email headers associated with the spammed emails they always seem to say hostname "primarydomain.com", and sender domain "siblingdomain.com":

X-AntiAbuse: Primary Hostname - primarydomain.com
X-AntiAbuse: Original Domain - gmail.com
X-AntiAbuse: Originator/Caller UID/GID - [502 501] / [47 12]
X-AntiAbuse: Sender Address Doamin - siblingdomain.com

I'm suspicious that because the primary hostname doesn't match the sender address domain, gmail immediately thinks it's spam. Would you think that's the case? I cannot change the hostname because i have other domains under that VPS account that may get affected as well. Any ideas?

Thanks.

 

[Jake Bunce]

I'm suspicious that because the primary hostname doesn't match the sender address domain, gmail immediately thinks it's spam. Would you think that's the case?

I haven't heard of that.

RDNS is the big one. See this thread:

http://xenforo.com/community/threads/dealing-with-spam-filters.8530/

 

[Michael J]

Thanks Jake.

I checked the headers again, and i see this:

Received: from primarydomain.com (xx.xx.xxae.static.theplanet.com [ip address]) by...

I've replaced the numbers btw. Now when i do an RDNS on the ip address i get "xx.xx.xxae.static.theplanet.com" in the response. Would this be the problem? If so, would it need to match my primary domain or my sibling domain?

Thanks.

 

[Jake Bunce]

According to that guide I found, the resolved IP address specifically needs to match the host name in the Received header which is:

Received: from primarydomain.com (xx.xx.xxae.static.theplanet.com [ip address]) by...

If it doesn't match then your emails are failing RDNS which is a red flag with spam filters.

 

[Michael J]

I contacted my hosting provider, hostgator and asked them if they could set the RDNS for my host. They did that and i checked it via http://postmaster.aol.com/cgi-bin/plugh/rdns.pl and it now returns my primarydomain.com hostname. So i tried doing a test registration - the confirmation email is STILL going into spam. I have absolutely no idea what to do now.

This is one of the headers:

Delivered-To: xxxx@gmail.com
Received: by 10.68.42.199 with SMTP id q7cs4568pbl;
Tue, 19 Jul 2011 23:11:57 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.91.51.4 with SMTP id d4mr7673097agk.174.1311142316587;
Tue, 19 Jul 2011 23:11:56 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path: <contact@gplusforums.org>
Received: from mij.mijidij.com (mij.mijidij.com [174.120.217.123])
by mx.google.com with ESMTPS id q10si1084337anm.43.2011.07.19.23.11.54
(version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=OTHER);
Tue, 19 Jul 2011 23:11:55 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of contact@gplusforums.org designates 174.120.217.123 as permitted sender) client-ip=174.120.217.123;
DomainKey-Status: good
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=pass (google.com: domain of contact@gplusforums.org designates 174.120.217.123 as permitted sender) smtp.mail=contact@gplusforums.org; domainkeys=pass header.From=contact@gplusforums.org
Message-Id: <4e2671ab.0a71650a.6cd1.1f49SMTPIN_ADDED@mx.google.com>
DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=default; d=gplusforums.org;
h=Received:Subject:To:Fromate:Content-Type:MIME-Version;
b=N5zK4Pk46H9M2rm1AAfYYHG2VhpAHsoIHdyFUa7emnsAWqYHNwuxL8AiqDQlsI2lthzdYvRzeIKHXIdLl3OxsbsXacSEStnifJpfcJ6xPjqI+vMP5VlUBy12ez+Las/V;
Received: from mij.mijidij.com ([174.120.217.123] helo=localhost)
by mij.mijidij.com with esmtpsa (TLSv1:AES256-SHA:256)
(Exim 4.69)
(envelope-from <contact@gplusforums.org>)
id 1QjQ0g-0006GA-Br
for xxxx@gmail.com; Wed, 20 Jul 2011 01:11:54 -0500
Subject: Welcome!
To: mike <xxxx@gmail.com>
From: Google Plus Forums <contact@gplusforums.org>
Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2011 06:11:53 +0000
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="=_f09e19ea97f7de3a003a0edc94726237"
MIME-Version: 1.0
X-AntiAbuse: This header was added to track abuse, please include it with any abuse report
X-AntiAbuse: Primary Hostname - mij.mijidij.com
X-AntiAbuse: Original Domain - gmail.com
X-AntiAbuse: Originator/Caller UID/GID - [47 12] / [47 12]
X-AntiAbuse: Sender Address Domain - gplusforums.org

--=_f09e19ea97f7de3a003a0edc94726237
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

mike,=0A=0AIn order to complete your registration at G+ Plus Forums, you=
need to confirm your account by following the page below.=0A=0Ahttp://g=
plusforums.org/account-confirmation/22/email?c=3D10de245bb477b101=0A=0AT=
hanks for registering,=0AG+ Plus Forums

--=_f09e19ea97f7de3a003a0edc94726237
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

<html>=0A<head>=0A<title>Welcome!</title>=0A<base href=3D"http://gplusfo=
rums.org/" />=0A</head>=0A<body>=0A=0A<p>mike,</p>=0A=0A=0A</body>=0A</h=
tml>

--=_f09e19ea97f7de3a003a0edc94726237--

The primary domain is mij.mijidij.com and the sibling domain is gplusforums.org. I have hit a brick wall and have absolutely no idea what to do. Please help. Thanks.

Mike.

 

[Jake Bunce]

Yep, RDNS is working now.

FWIW, I just registered on http://gplusforums.org/ and I received the email in my inbox. I used my yahoo account. It appears to be working.

But there is a different problem. The email I received was not a confirmation email. It simply said "Welcome!" in the subject, and the body said my username and that's it. Do you have any addons installed that have to do with registration?

 

[Michael J]

Hi Jake,

Thanks for doing that. For some reason i just cannot get any gmail accounts to accept it as a legit email!!! It's driving me insane. I have another forum that i also created at http://iphone5forums.org and it had the same issue before, but this time round i tried it with a gmail account and it worked. I just dont know why the gplusforums.org one wont work. Is it because of the fact that i'm using the word "Google" in there?

Also the reason why the subject and contents are different in that email you received is because i modified it thinking the contents may have been a factor in making it look like spam. But it wasn't.

Do you think the fact that the email says "from Google Plus Forums", google immediately marks it as spam? If so, how do i change the words? I've tried modifying my original board title from "Google Plus Forums" to "G+ Forums" but it didn't change the 'from' field.

Thanks.

 

[Jake Bunce]

Do you think the fact that the email says "from Google Plus Forums", google immediately marks it as spam?

I don't know. But I haven't heard of that before.

Ultimately you may have to contact Google about this. It's their spam filter and we already addressed the common red flags which is all you can do from your end.

 

[Floris]

Set IN A record for the host to point to the dedicated IP
Set a PTR record for the IP to reverse resolve to the HOST

Set the server's domain/name/host to the IP and HOST
Go through the sendmail configuration set up to ensure it's binding to the right IP
And send the mail from the domain where it's coming from.

This should already resolve a lot of issues.

tail -F mail.log (or whatever the mail log file is called on your system)

And send out some mails and read out the response from the third party site back to mail system.

 

[Michael J]

Hi all,

It's finally working . I went to my spam folder and basically just selected all the confirmation emails and marked them as NOT SPAM. I asked other people to do the same. And hey presto! Emails are now going in to the proper inbox. Same for hotmail addresses. I have no idea whether marking those emails as NOT SPAM made this work, but i did not do anything else apart from that.

Thanks for the help Jake and Floris. It was very much appreciated.