Mail from pemlinweb07

[BarryR]

Is anyone else having problems sending email to gmail accounts from a website hosted by Blacknight? I mean sending email directly from the website (e.g automatic responses to filling out a form).

Two websites I have on pemlinweb07 have serious problems - all mail to gmail accounts is classified as spam. Is it just me or is this affecting all 150 websites hosted on pemlinweb07?

[blacknight]

What is sending the email?
ie. is it a common CMS or a commonly used script or something custom?
Without knowing more about what you are doing it's hard to give advice
Thanks

[BarryR]

I've already been in touch with Blacknight support about this [#RST-246450] and given all details (mail headers etc) but I'm told there's nothing they can do. I'm now trying to find out if what I suspect is true, that this affects everyone on pemlinweb07.

The problem occurs for email sent by any script on the web server, and it doesn't matter if it sends it direct to the destination or via Blacknight's smtp server. A test script run on 2 websites I have on pemlinweb07 both produced the problem (gmail classifies the received mail as spam), but the same test script run on a website on pemlinweb94 and sending to the same gmail address had no problem.

The evidence points to pemlinweb07 being considered by gmail to be a source of spam, which is a very serious problem for us and, I think, for the other 150 or so websites hosted on pemlinweb07.

[blacknight]

I'll have a look at the ticket, but you haven't answered my questions.

[forbairt]

Are you using any authentification on the emails you're sending or are you simply relying on php mail function sending from the system ?

[BarryR]

I'm not really looking to go over everything we went through already on email exchanges with Blacknight support over the last few days. I posted here in public to try to find out if anyone else on pemlinweb07 is having the same problem.

Wait!

Half way through writing this reply I decided to re-check the problem, and it seems to be corrected. Don't know why. Maybe google acted on my email to their support, maybe something else. I'll do some more checks and come back.

[blacknight]

I've asked one of our more senior technical team to look at your ticket to confirm something

However to start with you do not have an SPF record set for the domain name. Setting that would be a good start.

[BarryR]

At the moment it seems that if I send mail from the website using smtp to smtp1r unauthenticated it gets through. If I use authenticated smtp it gets marked as spam by gmail. This is different from yesterday, and I don't know what has changed or if it will stay that way.

Re spf: I asked support about this but got no advice. Our domain has an inactive txt record "spf1 a mx". It's marked as system, and we didn't inactivate it so I presumed there was good reason for it to be like that (I have a suspicion it was active when I looked at it last week but I can't be sure). Should I activate it? spf seems like a bit of a black art so I'm reluctant to go fiddling with it without advice.

[blacknight]

You should activate an SPF record for any domain that sends email.

I'd recommend opening a separate ticket with our support team if you are not sure about how to set it up.

[BarryR]

Just to close out this issue and provide information for anyone else chasing a similar problem, it seems to have been fixed by creating an appropriate SPF record in the DNS for our domain. It looks like the spam decision algorithms on gmail have various levels of trust (or lack of it) for various servers, which can lead to email from or through those servers being classified as spam some or all of the time. The more specific the SPF record to the original source of the email the more it seems to move the algorithms to make a positive decision about the email. In our case our domain had no SPF record.

So, if you find Wordpress or similar is unable to send email to gmail, or gmail classifies the email as spam, try this:

1. Install a Wordpress plugin that allows you to use smtp to send email (e.g. WP-Mail-SMTP), instead of the php mail() function that Wordpress uses.
2. Configure it to use Blacknight's smtp servers. Authentication doesn't seem to be required, but it might be a good idea.
3. Create a DNS record to provide SPF information. That's a record of type TXT, and I used the following value for it:
v=spf1 a include:spf.blacknight.ie ~all

Within an hour gmail stopped classifying our email as spam, and the email headers showed that the new SPF information was being used.

Thanks to Blacknight staff who put time into helping to solve this.