GMail and googlemail users no longer receiving Virtualmin.com notifications

Howdy all,

This morning, I opened my mail box to find a few thousand bounce notifications for mail sent to gmail.com and googlemail.com. I’m guessing one too many people clicked “this is spam” on our notifications emails, sending it over the threshold (please don’t do that; if you don’t want to receive notifications anymore, just unsubscribe on your “My Account” page under notifications, there is a link to unsubscribe all).

As most of you probably know, we don’t send any unsolicited mail; everything we send is related directly to a license you have purchased, to a forum post or category you have subscribe to, or a support ticket you have filed or responded to or otherwise subscribed to.

So, this post is to let folks know that if you’re using GMail, you possibly won’t be getting notifications from Virtualmin.com for a while, so check back on the website for new stuff on your tickets; we aren’t ignoring you, Google just won’t let us email you to let you know when you’ve gotten a response.

Given that, I’d like to ask a favor of folks who use GMail to receive messages from Virtualmin.com (this helps you, too, since you presumably want to receive the messages you’ve signed up for):

  1. Check your spam folder for messages from Virtualmin.com. Mark them as “not spam”, if you find any.

  2. Add info@virtualmin.com (for forums) and 0@www.virtualmin.com (for ticket tracker; this address is a little weird because of a bug in the Project Issue tracker in Drupal that’s existed for about a million years, but should be fixed in the new Drupal 7 website going online in a few days) and sales@virtualmin.com (for orders in the store) to your address book at GMail.

Also, if this doesn’ t get resolved in a day or so, all GMail addresses will have notifications disabled. You’ll need to re-enable them manually at some point in the future, if you want to start receiving them again (and assuming Google eventually believes our notifications aren’t spam again).

Cheers,
Joe

As of yesterday I still received correctly notifications from forum on my Google Apps (the pro version of GMail). :wink:

Cool, thanks for letting me know. It’s actually not as complete of a block as I’d thought. It is currently seemingly only blocking notifications from the ticket tracker (the one with the weird email address…unsurprisingly, perhaps, since that one falls outside of our SPF record, but I think we’ve fixed that now, though we’re still seeing bounces from that address).

In the meantime, I have set notifications for all users who have been bouncing to only receive notifications of tickets that they created. Those will continue to bounce, I guess, but I’ll reach out to them individually on a case-by-case basis if it persists for more than another day or two (maybe getting our SPF and DKIM sorted will fix it).

Cheers,

Joe

Yep, Google’s Bulk Senders Guidelines https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126
say:

We also recommend the following:

Sign messages with DKIM. We do not authenticate messages signed with keys using fewer than 1024 bits.
Publish an SPF record.
Publish a DMARC policy.