Hello, I have a Mail-in-a-Box server running on a DigitalOcean droplet. It is running great, with a couple of small hiccups and one larger issue. The larger issue is that my mail is being flagged as spam by google mail and hotmail (or whatever the microsoft mail is these days). I found a forum post in the forum suggesting a website http://www.allaboutspam.com. I sent my test email to the address posted on the site and the report back indicated that my email server is not using BATV format. How do I configure my email server to use this BATV format? I posted a snap shot of the BATV portion of the report below. I’m not sure if this is the cause of my problems, but everything on the report showed green except for this BATV issue. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.
How do you get around the spam filters of Gmail and microsoft, yahoo, etc, etc, etc. A majority of people I send email don’t have the technical know how to flag my emails as non-spam. Thanks.
I have to echo Josh here. Run your server through the MXToolbox supertool and blacklist checker. You may have ended up getting an IP (in a range) that is on a block list. That’s where the vast majority of these issues come from. BATV tags aren’t (usually) a hard fail in spam analysis.
Hello, sorry for the late reply. I went to the MXToolbox and ran my domain through it. No problems were found. My domain and its associated IP address are not on any blacklists. Does anybody know why my emails go to spam with google. Do they have their own blacklists that aren’t published? Does anybody other than google know this information? Is there a way I can test mail sent to google? Thanks for the help as always.
So after I posted my last reply, I sent an email to one of my gmail accounts. I fished the email out of the spam folder in thunderbird, and went to “View Source”. The info in the image below is what i found:
The highlighted line is what I suspect to be the problem. I did some checking and I found an abundance of info on dmarc, spf, and dkim. It is my hope that somebody will know exactly what to do and point me in the direction of another forum post or tutorial on how this can be fixed or at least point me in the direction of steps to take to make my emails conform so they don’t continue to be quarantined. If not, then my weekend plans have just been solidified with homework. Thanks.
dmarc=pass indicates the DMARC test passed. That’s a good thing. (p=quarantine is information about the policy in place, but doesn’t indicate it was quarantined.)
It doesn’t look like you are using a recent version of Mail-in-a-Box. Version 0.13 added a change to the Received: line that someone thought might be a factor:
Thank you and sorry at the same time. For whatever reason I thought Mail-in-a-box was updated when i did my apt-get upgrade. I will do a better job of keeping my M-I-B install up to date. I do have a concern regarding the update process of M-i-B. I see that the only instructions are to download the latest release and then follow the steps for creating a new server. I tried to do a search for updating M-i-B, but I don’t see a check list of things to do pre-update. Can you point me to another forum post or tutorial for updating M-i-B to a new release? I would assume I have some files and databases to backup first. Thanks.
Ok, so i upgraded my server to version 14 and sent another email to my gmail account. It appears that the issue addressed on github which you referenced in your earlier response (quoted above) is working correctly on my server. a line from my previous email is:
Received: from authenticated-user (unknown [127.0.0.1])
and is now:
Received: from authenticated-user (mail.mydomain.com [111.222.333.444])
However the email is still ending up in the spam folder. This particular gmail account has no filters setup so there is nothing I have done that would make google mark my emails as junk. I don’t have Thunderbird setup to look for spam, i leave that up to google. I also tried sending email from both the thunderbird client and from the Roundcube interface provided with mail-in-a-box, no change, email still gets dumped into the spam folder. Any other ideas?
So as I was digging around the admin panel on my server. I went under System > and external dns and I was reading the page about what to do if i want to setup external dns servers for my mail server. As i was reading the page, i saw some references to some text files (highlighted in the picture below). When i first configured my Mail-in-a-Box server I set up the server as the primary and secondary name server per the installation instructions. When i setup a Mail-in-a-Box server does it come with the hightlighted text files in the picture or do i have to set all that up myself?
I appologize for making you go through the steps of replying. After doing some research I came to the same conclusion, but I couldn’t get back to the forum to say as much. Anyway, back to my original issue. I sent an email to my hotmail account and it went through correctly. So that is a plus. I am still having issues with gmail though. I sent an email to their tech support. Hopefully that will get me somewhere. Thanks for all your help.
