Status around spam issues

Les Actus IndieHosters
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Dear email users,

since some weeks now, we have some issues. We have 2 kind of issues:

  • inbound spam
  • outbound spam

Inbound spam is the spam we receive in our mailbox. I’ve been notified that lately it was quiet hard.
Outbound spam is when our legitimate emails are marked as spam.

(I just created these terms, if you know better ones?)

Unfortunately, we are not gmail in this area. I understand that the experience is less than ideal, and I promise I’m doing the best I can, but I think I reached my limit. I spent more than 20hours now, without much success.

I think that thanks to the maintenance from this morning the inbound spam should be mainly resolved.

For the outboud spam, I’m close to abandon, it is not my nature, but this time, it is a tough one…

I’ll write 2 HowTos to help fight both.

But in the meantime I’ll write all the debugging steps, maybe somebody can help?

What I did so far

We are currently marked as spam with the following provider:

  • live/outlook

Here are the raw source messages that are marked as spam.

I contacted yahoo, they said they don’t care, and outlook, they told me some days ago that my IP was being mitigated, still waiting…

In all (really I think all :slight_smile: ) the tools available like:

  • spamlist
  • senderscore
  • email test
  • mxtools
  • dmarc reports

We are all good! And Gmail doesn’t mark us as spam.
spf,dkim,dmarc are well configured, I even increased dmarc to p=reject, just to be even more sure.

If you want to check with your procedure, our email server is mail.indie.host.
(I could also create you an account).

idea of improvement

In total we send around 200 mails per day, not that much…

We send 2 kind of emails:

  • personal emails from personal mailboxes
  • system emails from different systems:
    • wordpress
    • rocketchat
    • nextcloud
    • discourse

Just to be extra careful, I deactivated some email address of some WP.
Discourse is definitely the good kid around, all the mails it sends are with the « Unsubscribe » link.
So I guess one way would be to change email template for Nextcloud and RocketChat to add this « unsubscribe » link and headers.

possibility → add « unsubscribe » link and headers to Nextcloud and RocketChat email template

But well, beside that, I’m clueless…

If you have any ideas, it would help me a lot :slight_smile:

Dankeshon!

Edit

No longer marked as spam on yahoo, just microsoft is remaining.

1 « J'aime »
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If you still have issues,
can you write me to:

Then I can try investigate further.

Thanks!

3

I’ve got more issues with sending emails to Gmail. Even when sending a reply to an email sent from a Gmail account, or when sending an email to an account who already has me in their contacts, I get bounced back.

Here is an example of bounce back:

Reporting-MTA: dns; mail.indie.host
X-Postfix-Queue-ID: D7A3D310481
X-Postfix-Sender: rfc822; XXXXX@member.fsf.org
Arrival-Date: Wed, 29 Dec 2021 14:06:08 +0000 (UTC)

Final-Recipient: rfc822; XXXXX@gmail.com
Original-Recipient: rfc822;XXXXX@gmail.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.7.1
Remote-MTA: dns; gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 550-5.7.1 [195.201.199.169      12] Our system has
    detected that this message is 550-5.7.1 likely unsolicited mail. To reduce
    the amount of spam sent to Gmail, 550-5.7.1 this message has been blocked.
    Please visit 550-5.7.1
    https://support.google.com/mail/?p=UnsolicitedMessageError 550 5.7.1  for
    more information. p10si13947872wrr.983 - gsmtp

Would maybe this report help in fixing the issues that put us in the « spam » basket?

https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/checkmx/check?domain=mail.indie.host&dkim_selector=

I will try Pierre’s emails to see what happens.

4

It seems using the « reply to » field instead of the « from » field for my FSF alias fixed it.
I tested Pierre’s three email addresses (Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook) and didn’t get a bounce back.
(not sure about the email being checked into the spam folder, but at least it reached the accounts :slight_smile: )

Cheers

5

@stragu thanks for your test, I confirm that your email was only marked as spam on Microsoft.

Your signature has 2 links, I guess that spam filters don’t like it so much, especially when the amount of text is not that high.

If I send form one of the email I use regularly to test, it passes the spam check, but I guess it is because, I marked it as non spam several times as well.

It is so annoying… I really feel like in Kafka, accused by algo to be a spammer, without any possibility to know why… Or even defend myself… so frustrating…

I’d like to plan a strike day, where all little hosters bounce back microsoft one day with a message to call Microsoft support. I don’t know what but something that does have an impact on their business…

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