Hotmail tags emails from my server as Junk/Spam

kokari · 03-03-2007, 10:59 PM

I have a dedicated linux box, which I use for hosting my web sites (for multiple domains). For these domains, MX records point to a professional e-mail hosting service, so this dedicated box is only used for web hosting + sending emails to users related to these sites (NO SPAM, ONLY ACTION ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS LIKE REGISTRATION COMPLETED, COMMENT APPROVED, ETC.). And, all emails are sent from one shared IP via sendmail, since sendmail uses the main IP address.

So, my setup is like this:

1. Dedicated linux box has 1 main IP address (IP1) with domain dame host.domain.com. Reverse lookup on IP1 gives host.domain.com

2. One of the sites on it, let's say x.com, also has a dedicated IP address (IP2) with proper reverse PTR. And, MX record for x.com points to outside.

3. When I sent an e-mail for x.com, let's say from admin@x.com, it is sent from the base/shared ip: IP1.

4. Linux box does not receive connections on port 25, that port is blocked/closed. Simply because, I don't want to receive any e-mail on this machine. Once again, it is just used for web hosting...

5. The SPF records for x.com is created properly, i.e. it has IP1, IP2 and host.domain.com.

But, after all I have done, whenever I send an email to an hotmail address, it still is placed in the junk folder???

BTW, all mails sent to Yahoo and GMail reach the inbox, without getting tagged as spam, with GMail putting in the headers that domain has proper SPF records.

This issue has been driving crazy, and would appreciate any suggestions for how I can get this resolved.

Thanks in advance.

billymayday · 03-03-2007, 11:08 PM

Does external reverse dns in IP1 work? This is often used to flag spam

kokari · 03-03-2007, 11:12 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by billymayday

Does external reverse dns in IP1 work? This is often used to flag spam

Hi,

External Reverse DNS work for both IP1 and IP2 and they resolve correctly. I have tested this from my home and places like dnsstuff.com

farslayer · 03-04-2007, 12:34 AM

Did you check through everything on the MSN postmaster page ?
http://postmaster.msn.com/

They explain what they block and why...

kokari · 03-04-2007, 10:36 PM

Got the following email from MSN? Have no idea why it was blocked, still!...

And, yeah I checked all the rules they set...

Quote:

We have identified that messages from your IP (X.X.X.X) are being filtered based on the recommendations of the SmartScreen filter. SmartScreen is the spam filtering technology developed and operated by Microsoft. SmartScreen is built around the technology of machine learning. SmartScreen’s filters are trained to recognize what is spam and what isn’t spam. In short, we filter incoming emails that look like spam. I am not able to go into any specific details about what these filters specifically entail, as this would render them useless.

billymayday · 03-05-2007, 12:41 AM

Could be that they simply block IP ranges where one of the IPs has sent spam, or similar. Have you checked any of the spam blocking lists for your IP?

farslayer · 03-05-2007, 09:16 PM

Have you ever looked through the rules that spamassassin uses ?
message is HTML
Message contains links
message contains words such as.,..
message contains the phrase...
message contains the word ...
etc..

Might be worth looking through the rule set spamassassin uses, could be you are formulating your messages in such a manner that they would be identified as spam by many different filters..

Just a thought