Mail Delivery Problems

[ChrisTERiS]

Don't know if you've the same bad experience with me, but I've big problem to deliver system mails to my members. And don't think that I'm talking for a huge amount of messages. In most cases they're less than 100 per day, don't say per week. If it was a mass mailing, even with a few recipients, I can understand it. But the same happen even to single system emails like email address confirmation, reset password etc.

I know that mail servers have criteria that determine spam. eg New domain, multiple emails to different accounts on the same time etc. But when I checked my domain eg at MXToolbox, all the results are green. None red. Also I don't think that the problem comes from the software (XenForo in my case), so I did a test installing XF, IPS, vB4 on the same (new) domain and then tried to send a simple newsletter (no images, no html, simple text), to 25 email addresses. What (bad) surprise. 21 of them (XF and IPS, 19 from vB) came back with mail delivery errors. Ok, 3 of them were with invalid user account, or user account over quota.

I've minimal experience with Servers, much more with Mail Servers. The only that I succeed to do is to follow some instruction in an Article and I "clean" my domain to Gmail (Added some TXT to DNS). But again, on the next mailing, most of my messages to Gmails accounts blocked.

Another strange problem that I found, but this time in other sites, is that I'm getting their newsletters, but I'm not getting other system emails. I don't plan to list domains here, as I don't want to blame anybody for something that also happen in my own site.

So, what do you suggest me? For a moment that I was so frustrated from these problems, I was ready to buy an extra service to setup/keep alive my mail server, but the cost was out of my budget. I know that there are some mail providers out there, but as I've understand these are just for sending newsletters while I want to be sure that all my emails (newsletters and system messages), will be deliver.

As an underline. I don't care if I'll not be able to use my domain name, but for sure I prefer it. That said, a sender mydomain@mail_provider.com is acceptable.

Thank you
Chris

 

[JulianD]

Are you using your own SMTP server or a third party one such as AWS SES/SendGrid/SparkPost?

My suggestion if you're not using one of those service providers is to get rid of your SMTP server and start using one of those for transactional emails.

 

[ChrisTERiS]

@JulianD I'm using my own SMTP. I'll give a look to those services. Send Grid is supported by IPS (I've a license with them), but when I visited their site I got the feeling that their service is just for mass mailing, while I want to pass somewhere, all my mail server's work.

Thank you

 

[JulianD]

@JulianD I'm using my own SMTP. I'll give a look to those services. Send Grid is supported by IPS (I've a license with them), but when I visited their site I got the feeling that their service is just for mass mailing, while I want to pass somewhere, all my mail server's work.

Thank you

Unfortunately it is very complicated to manage your own SMTP server. I understand if you do but then you have to warm up your IP address, keep track of spam reports, blacklists and, as you're experiencing right now, undeliverable email.

AWS SES is very cheap and it is supported by XenForo so give it a try!

 

[djbaxter]

Make sure that your server/account has valid entries for SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. In cPanel, you can set these via Email Delivery.

 

[ChrisTERiS]

Hello @djbaxter I'm happy to see you always active around the net

Yes, have checked everything in a dozen of online check. Till now didn't found any problem other than some unimportant warnings that I fixed (eg missing abuse and postmaster email address.

Here is from DNSstuff



Even DMARC is correct. Here a screenshot from MXToolbox.


To understand how much in deep settings have gone, I've replaced v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:xxxxxxx with v=DMARC1; p=quarantine; rua=mailto:xxxxxxxx

Best wishes
Chris

 

[djbaxter]

Various email providers have become increasingly aggressive with their anti-spam and bulk email measures, especially Gmail, Microsoft (Live, Hotmail, Outlook.com), and AOL (I was surprised to see how many people still use AOL).

Have you tried using the Xenforo default PHP mail instead of SMTP? That actually seems to have a better success rate than SMTP for many installations or servers.

 

[ChrisTERiS]

Have you tried using the Xenforo default PHP mail instead of SMTP? That actually seems to have a better success rate than SMTP for many installations or servers.

Actually I started with the default PHP and when I seen so horrible results I changed to SMTP latelly. But nothing better happen. It's 3 days now that I started using Protonmail which adds some extra settings to DNS. Also whitelist my domain to Google Postmaster page. Let's see....