My sent mail always ends up in spam.

[Nicky Vermeersch]

Hello! Recently I wanted to start using my dedicated server to send out alerts, newsletters, and updates (if the users wants to, its on opt-in basis) to my user's email adresses. The dedicated server was a minimal installation where I installed nginx, php-fpm (the things needed to run xenforo). Afterwards, I did the following things:

- Installed postfix to allow Xenforo to send emails. I'm using a no-reply@mcmiddleearth.com, which doesn't excist for postfix. I also don't have a postmaster@ abuse@ or whatever that is needed, since I'm very new to setting email services up. Are these actually required to prevent you from being blacklisted?

- Made sure that all my mail that is being sent from the dedicated server is DKIM signed. I verified this by using a website such as http://dkimcore.org/tools/dkimrecordcheck.html that does this for me by looking up the host record of a domain.

- Added an SPF record to my domain.

However my emails still are ending up in Gmail's spam. And according to LogWatch, postfix is having issues sending mail to Yahoo users. Does anyone here have experience setting up mail servers or preventing these kind of problems?

 

[Paul B]

This resource may help: https://xenforo.com/community/resources/dealing-with-spam-filters.366/

 

[Nicky Vermeersch]

Thank you @Brogan ! I noticed that usage of the -f parameter is recommend, but I have it off (default setting?). However the emails that I receive and are in the spam folder, show as if they were actually sent from the 'primary adress' I used in the xenforo config. I don't really understand why an SMTP server would be any different? I thought postfix was a 'sendmail' alternative with compatibility to the old (rather insecure?) sendmail program. The only thing I don't have is a program that lets you collect the received emails (pop3). By default, my system's postfix creates mail accounts for any user (for example nginx, user1, user2, etc ...) but I just remote those inboxes through a cronjob from time to time as the server only should be sending outward mails.

For now I'm temporarily redirecting my mails by using Google Mail, but since it's limited to 2.000 mails (sending and receiving) a day, this really isn't much at all.

 

[WSWD]

To be honest, a lot of providers completely block Hetzner, due to the large amounts of abuse and spam that come from their network (even though they claim a zero tolerance spam policy). If it's ending up in the spam folder, Gmail obviously isn't blocking them entirely, but they could most certainly be automatically marking anything from their network as spam. You might consider writing Google and trying to work with them to determine what the problem might be. They have been very responsive in the past when we have needed to figure out email issues with them. Yahoo and Hotmail, you can pretty much forget it. They will be completely unwilling to work with you.

 

[TPerry]

- Installed postfix to allow Xenforo to send emails. I'm using a no-reply@mcmiddleearth.com, which doesn't excist for postfix. I also don't have a postmaster@ abuse@ or whatever that is needed, since I'm very new to setting email services up. Are these actually required to prevent you from being blacklisted?

Yes, the are required to be compliant with RFC's. It's not that big of a deal, and odds are you already have them - you just don't realize it. They are usually listed in the /etc/aliases file and point at root as the recipient.

Also, be aware that all that site does is CHECK your DNS entry to see it if is compliant. It does not actually check your DKIM signing of the emails.
If you really want to check it, use https://www.mail-tester.com/.

However my emails still are ending up in Gmail's spam. And according to LogWatch, postfix is having issues sending mail to Yahoo users. Does anyone here have experience setting up mail servers or preventing these kind of problems?

Yahoo is really picky - as is Hotmail. I had to contact Hotmail and they said they added a temp exclusion, but I don't really know as I haven't had any users sign up with a hotmail address since then.