Not getting emails from the Forum or Hoffmanamps? Updated 03/2015

[EL34]

I get many emails bounced back to me that the forum tried to send or Hoffmanamps tried to send.

add these domains to your approved email sends list.

hoffmanamps.com and
el34world.com

[EL34]

03/03/2015 Update

Just the last week or so, MSN, Hotmail, comcast, verizon, optonline,peoplepc and several other places have been rejecting emails from the forum and returning them to me as undelivered

If you have not gotten a reply back from the forum regarding a new membership, just log in, chances are your membership was approved and you just did not get the email

I went to each of the sites that was rejecting our emails and got us off the spammer list

Not sure how we got on that list, I never do mass mailouts outs and the sever is secure so it will not allow others to take control and use it for evil purposes

I read on one site that if people label your email as spam that the ISP takes note and starts lowering the servers reputation
When the reputation hits a certain lower number then you are labelled as a spammer

[pompeiisneaks]

I work for a company that does email, specifically email security and anti spam etc.  One of the things I noticed is that your reverse lookup for the IP of your mail server doesn't match the forward.  (its one of the things that email services look at to consider things 'spammy')  when I do a mail exchanger (MX) lookup of your domain I get :

dig +short mx el34world.com
10 mail.el34world.com.

dig +short mail.el34world.com
166.63.127.229

dig -x 166.63.127.229

dig +short -x 166.63.127.229
CloudStack.CloudIX.COM.

That is at least one reason you may end up blocked by some sites.  The other reason you mentioned is definitely a possibility but you'd have to be reported en masse ususally for that to happen, i.e. maybe 10-20 reports over a few days to get blacklisted by one site. 

If you can contact your ISP and ask them to set the reverse (PTR) record for your mail server's IP to point to your domain that will help.

( i.e that last query for the IP should return mail.el34world.com )

If you have any other questions, feel free to PM me or email me.

~Phil

[EL34]

I have my own cloud server on a Windows server 2008 R2 platform
I can do that by RDPing the server if I can figure it out how to do that


I'll have to go have a look

[pompeiisneaks]

Usually reverse DNS isn't managed by the domain owner, it is managed by the ISP.  I run my own DNS servers for my domains, web servers, email servers etc, and I've always had to go to the IPS. they own and mange the IP's they're just letting you use it.

~Phil

[EL34]

el34world.com emails come from my server.
The forum software send emails from my cloud server

comporium.net is my ISP
I don't see any info there regarding my ISP which I do not use to send emails from the forum
So I am not sure how my ISP is involved in this?

All this info you posted is my cloud server info
dig +short mx el34world.com
10 mail.el34world.com.
dig +short mail.el34world.com
166.63.127.229dig -x 166.63.127.229
dig +short -x 166.63.127.229
CloudStack.CloudIX.COM.

[pompeiisneaks]

There is one assumption that I've made that may be wrong.  When you send mail outbound, does it come from your DNS MX record?  (Mail eXchanger).  What I've got there is what a normal server does to figure out what your mail server is

dig is a tool to lookup the dns data for a domain, the query

dig +short mx el34world.com gives me the answer to the question 'what is your mail server el34world.com'
it answered it is mail.el34world.com

That would be who people send mail 'to' when their server is looking for your domain

You may not send mail from that same server, but that is unusual.  If all mail comes in and out through that same host then all that I've said applies. 

If not you'd need to perform a 'dig -x youroutboundmailserver.el34world.com' type query

we could put this to PM's so we're discussing the infrastructure of your stuff less on a public forum though.

There are a few other things you can setup in DNS to make your email servers look more legitimate, like add an SPF record.

~Phil

[pompeiisneaks]

I just realized that I know of a good site you can use to check out mail settings:

http://mxtoolbox.com/

Just type in your domain and go, there are two things you can do, one is look if you're on any blacklists, the other is to see if there are any configuration issues with your domain.  You also mentioned that the forum host is a different one from the mail host.  You should then do one of two things:

1. setup the mail server on the forums to forward to your primary mail server as a relay, and make sure that host allows relaying from your forum host, so it looks more consistent to external sources.
2. setup a SPF record making it clear that both hosts are considered as allowed mail sending hosts.

Again, if you'd like to chat via PM or email I can go into more detail,  This is my primary job, and I know it well, and I'm not trying to sell you anything, I love the forums already and just want to pay you back for such an amazing resource here and at hoffmanamps.com.

If you're not interested, by all means, just move along and have a great day.

~Phil

[EL34]

No, thanks for the help, I forgot all about this

The forum is on my cloud server and so is the email server that I use for the forum

I'll check out the mx site when I get time