Emails reaching Junk or Spam folder

[VadaDosaIdly]

Hello All,

I am very much fond of hMailServer and stunned by seeing features and flexibility it offers.
For last few month, we have been seeing strange behaviors of emails sent from our hMailServer.
We have multiple domains and email accounts set up on one hMailserver. Sometimes people are complaining that our emails reach to their SPAM or JUNK folder and many times our business emails get unnoticed because of that. We have also noticed similar behaviour when emails are sent between email accounts setup within one hMailServer. Why is hMailServer or other external servers identifying our emails as SPAM or JUNK? It looks like hMailSever does not trust itself and marking those emails as SPAM.

What I am missing here? Please help.

[Virinum]

I often use https://www.mail-tester.com/ to see if I can improve something.

Also please run this https://www.hmailserver.com/forum/viewt ... 20&t=30914 and post the results so we can see if your configuration is wrong.

[mattg]

SPAM testing should not be done when the sender of the mail has AUTH (with account + password) to send mail


Also, check this great user guide
https://www.hmailserver.com/forum/viewt ... 21&t=32458

[VadaDosaIdly]

I often use https://www.mail-tester.com/ to see if I can improve something.

Hi Virinum,
Thank you for replying to my message. I ran a test at https://www.mail-tester.com and got 4.8 score. Score details are as follows. Please advice what needs to be done if you think there is room for improvement.

TEST RESULT
The famous spam filter SpamAssassin. Score: -2.2. A score below -5 is considered spam.

You are not allowed to use one of your sender email addresses -3
[SPF]mydomain.org does not allow your server xx.xxx.xxx.x to use email@mydomain.org
Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an email validation system designed to prevent email spam by detecting email spoofing, a common vulnerability, by verifying sender IP addresses.

Verification details:
dig +short TXT mydomain.org :
"google-site-verification=hMT2YyG4ZDCANzCsDvPgNDJKso1zuaCFa8XyQY"
"v=spf1 ip4:xx.xxx.xxx.xx a mx include:mydomain.org ?all"
dig +short TXT @ns1.mydnsserver.com. mydomain.org :
"v=spf1 ip4:xx.xxx.xxx.xx a mx include:mydomain.org ?all"
"google-site-verification=hMT2YyG4ZDCANzCsDvPgNDJKso1zuaCFa8XyQY"
spfquery --scope mfrom --id info@mydomain.org --ip xx.xxx.xxx.x --helo-id mail.mydnsserver.com :
permerror
mydomain.org ... mydomain.org: Maximum DNS-interactive terms limit (10) exceeded
mydomain.org ... mydomain.org: Maximum DNS-interactive terms limit (10) exceeded
Received-SPF: permerror (mydomain.org ... mydomain.org: Maximum DNS-interactive terms limit (10) exceeded) receiver=ns303428.ip-xx-xx-xxx.eu; identity=mailfrom; envelope-from="email@mydomain.org"; helo=mail.mydnsserver.com; client-ip=xx.xxx.xxx.x

Your reverse DNS does not match with your sending domain.
Reverse DNS lookup or reverse DNS resolution (rDNS) is the determination of a domain name that is associated with a given IP address.
Some companies such as AOL will reject any message sent from a server without rDNS, so you must ensure that you have one.
You cannot associate more than one domain name with a single IP address.

Your IP address xx.xxx.xxx.x is associated with the domain webserver.mydnsserver.com.
Nevertheless your message appears to be sent from mail.mydnsserver.com.

You may want to change your pointer (PTR type) DNS record and the host name of your server to the same value.

Here are the tested values for this check:
IP: xx.xxx.xxx.x
HELO: mail.mydnsserver.com
rDNS: webserver.mydnsserver.com

You're not blacklisted
No broken links

[mattg]

I often use https://www.mail-tester.com/ to see if I can improve something.

Please advice what needs to be done if you think there is room for improvement.

There are suggestions there from that page, at each point

It looks like hMailSever does not trust itself and marking those emails as SPAM.

Again

SPAM testing should not be done when the sender of the mail has AUTH (with account + password) to send mail

Making your users to log on to send mail is an easy step

[VadaDosaIdly]

After testing email at www.mail-tester.com, made few changes.

• Modified PTR records for reverse DNS for all domains.

• Modified SPF record from original "v=spf1 ip4:xx.xxx.xxx.xx a mx include:mydomain.org ?all" to "v=spf1 ip4:xx.xxx.xxx.xx a mx include:mydomain.org -all"

• After re-testing email at www.mail-tester.com, score jumped to 8.1 from 2.2. Do you think this is good score? Any other recommendations.

Test at www.mail-tester.com is for outgoing mails. Is there any other service where one can find score for incoming mail? This is just to make sure all genuine incoming mails are received.

Is it helpful to do full diagnostic report (HMSSettingsDiagnostics.zip v2.01 18) detailing the Hmailserver setup for aiding analysis on problems relating to email receiving, transmission and connections?

Thanks once again for helping.

[VadaDosaIdly]

SPAM testing should not be done when the sender of the mail has AUTH (with account + password) to send mail

How?

[mattg]

I just ran a test with my standard (large image) footer, and scored a 9.4/10

The large image accounts for the shortfall with a score for that being 0.7003 in total
The only additional thing I could have done was add an unsubscribe header - (but this wasn't a newsletter)

When I've tested before without my signature image I get 10/10
I test on a few sites, including this one >> https://mecsa.jrc.ec.europa.eu/en/
and this one >> https://dkimvalidator.com/

And then there are more once you have ssl encryption SET UP

SPAM testing should not be done when the sender of the mail has AUTH (with account + password) to send mail

How?

When your mail client longs on to send mail, that they are required to pass a username and password to hMailserver
What mail client are you using

[johang]

require SMTP authentication local to local ...

but it is rather unclear if that answers your question ..

[VadaDosaIdly]

-1.105 MIME_HTML_ONLY Message only has text/html MIME parts
You should also include a text version of your message (text/plain)

Now, www.mail-tester.com returning negative score because text/plain version of email is not included in email.
I wonder, how can both html and text version be set with hMailServer?

[Virinum]

hMailServer is just delivering the message your mail client creates. So you have to ask your mail client (like Thunderbird) how to do that.

Technically it is just a multipart message which includes a part with content-type "text/plain" and a part with "text/html".

But you can also ignore this point. This tool is mainly developed for checking newsletters.

[VadaDosaIdly]

Hi Virinum,
I am using System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient to send messages.
How can both html and text version be set in the code?

[Virinum]

I never used this but a little bit of research gave me this: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library ... views.aspx