Installed virtualmin, all good, my problem is that email i send from my domain/server to gmail or hotmail accounts are going to spam, any way to fix it ?
thanks
You must enable and properly setup DKIM, SPF and rDNS. Without this 3 things Gmail will always mark your emails as spam, reject them or even put your IP/domain on their internal blacklist. DMARC isnt enforced but is good to have.
If you post the error you get from Gmail (email log) probably i could narrow down the problem but i know from experience that one of previously mentioned things are missing or not configured properly. Other thing to check is email headers from Gmail because there will be reason why that email was sent to spam.
Just to mention, if this server is located in your house, e.g. you are using your ISP connection you will never get rDNS from them and this problem cant be resolved.
Diabolico is right about GMail; if you’re on a fixed IP in a data center, and you get the DNS records right, you’ll likely begin to be able to send to Google.
Hotmail is more complicated. It’ll likely require you to sign up for their notification service (where they can notify you if spam comes from your address(es), and then request removal of your IP addresses from their blacklist. In my experience, a huge number of IP addresses are on their blacklist, and they never purge the list…the IP on which Virtualmin.com now resides was in our possession for several years, but never used for mail. When we migrated, all Microsoft hosted mail started bouncing. It took me some time to sort it out. But, they are responsive, once you jump through the hoops. But, make sure that if you’re sending in bulk email (like notifications from a forum, or something) you’re practicing good email hygiene (bounce handling, unsubscribes work fast, spam filtering on the forum itself) or you risk getting blocked again. I dunno what happens if they block you after unblocking.
@Joe: Thats pretty stupid thing from Hotmail. If my SOA contains valid postmaster email i dont see any reason why anyone should ask to register email to send notifications. Although rfc2142 suggest to be used hostmaster but i never had any problem with postmaster.
Yeah, I don’t understand it. Nobody else has the same kinds of hoops as Microsoft. What’s worse, 90% of the spam accounts that sign up for Virtualmin.com are @hotmail.com or @outlook.com addresses. So they want to prevent spam to their servers, but they’re OK with their email service being used to enable spam on other people’s servers.
Hi,
To add to what’s already been stated. Each ISP or provider can differ, though the points above are the general guidelines for most. Further to the above however, it’s important to monitor your maillog, and check for SMTP based errors. They can often become very useful in determining whether a message is being delivered to the inbox, or spam folder of a user’s mailbox. Most providers have either a blacklist lookup tool (or outsource it to another central provider), and other resources to aid in either preventing a listing on or removing yourself from their blacklist.
Often the steps by select providers can be a bit cryptic, so it’s important to do some research on any problematic provider to see what others have done to resolve any issues. Further you can subscribe to a number of “feedback loops” to proactively monitor when people are flagging your mail as spam, to ensure the provider doesn’t eventually blacklist you due to too many complaints.
As someone who manages email servers sending out millions of messages daily, I know first hand the woes of keeping off blacklists, and making sure as much mail as possible is properly delivered the inbox. It can often be quite frustrating, and a time consuming task.