# Main > Technical Support and Notices >  SMTP, I give up...

## Robbie

So... I've tried everything I can think of... I cannot for the life of me get outgoing email to not be seen as spam from this server. This means that many new users verification emails are not being received, as well as subscription notices and birthday notices and so on. 

This is also why I haven't put together any newsletters because what would be the point if they don't get received or accepted by the isp's. 

At this point I'd like to reach out to anyone who has any experience running an smtp only server (postfix) to help me out and maybe even take a look at things. I'd prefer someone who's been a member here for a long time that I can trust, but I'll take what I can get. If you have any experience with smtp and anti spam measures, please either post here, pm me, or use the contact us link at the bottom of the page. 

PR folks please feel free to tweet/fb this request for maximum visibility. 

Sent from my m8wl using Tapatalk

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## Mouse

I can't help on the technical side, but I volunteer to be a Guinea pig 'receiver' for any tests you might want to run  :Smile:

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## Straf

Have you checked the blacklists? The IP may have ended up on one accidentally.

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## Straf

I just set some notification to 'on' and have received email from this server. I have looked through the headers and can't see anything indicating it may be spam. In fact it verifies that the outgoing server is a permitted sender. Also it verifies that the DKIM sig is valid.

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## Robbie

> I just set some notification to 'on' and have received email from this server. I have looked through the headers and can't see anything indicating it may be spam. In fact it verifies that the outgoing server is a permitted sender. Also it verifies that the DKIM sig is valid.


Yup, everything is set up properly, and I'm passing all the tests... But for some reason I cannot get off of cloudmarks blocked list. 

Sent from my m8wl using Tapatalk

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## Straf

One of the mx nameservers is blacklisted on Backscatterer.

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## Robbie

Oh, which one? I'm unable to log on right now. 

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## Straf

I've sent the info via PM  :Smile:

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## Robbie

> I've sent the info via PM


That's the mx record for the domain hosts Mailer which is where I have email accounts. I thought mx was for pop3. Maybe I need to add a mx record for the web server also. 

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## Straf

If you are running SMTP on a send only basis on the web server then I don't think you need a mx record for it. Your incoming mail goes to a different server? That's all you need mx records for so unless the ISP is using the mx records as one of its checks then the blacklist doesn't make sense as I'd have thought the valid SPF record would override this anyway. It seems like an overzealous anti-spam measure, especially as it's probably not the done thing to make a send only server a mx. It could mess up the routing.

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## Slylok

Are the emails going out with html headers and hyperlinks? Try sending in plain text and see if they get through

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## Robbie

> Are the emails going out with html headers and hyperlinks? Try sending in plain text and see if they get through


I'll have to check the settings. I'm not sure. They're all automatically generated by vbulletin. Good suggestion, but that shouldn't be what is causing my mail to be considered spam. 

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## Straf

Good call Skylok!

Anti-spam checks look at the 'rich' content like HTML, heavy image use and links. 

Robbie - do you have a newsletter that you can send me? The notification emails I receive are all plain text as far as I can see, but they do have hyperlinks in them. BTW they are coming to my gmail account fine. I can at least see if they're getting through too.

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## Slylok

After rereading your OP, you're saying that the server sending the emails is marking them as spam? Are you getting an error to indicate this? Are they making it outside at all or getting stopped before?

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## Robbie

The web server is using postfix with opendkim to send the email and any isp that uses cloudmark for spam detection will deny the mail because I'm apparently on their bad list. Later tonight I can post a mail log entry to show you what I'm seeing. I've requested delisting numerous times but either they're not delisting me or I'm getting put right back on for who knows what reason. 

As for the newsletter, I was wrong about the newsletter... It's on a separate system and I think it might be ok... If the system generated mails are plain text then that's good... But they will have to have links in them because they're often verification emails or password reset emails or links to subscribed thread updates. 

Cloudmark supported ISPs are mostly your Internet providers. Gmail does their own verification and I seem to be good with them. 

Sent from my m8wl using Tapatalk

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## Slylok

> The web server is using postfix with opendkim to send the email and any isp that uses cloudmark for spam detection will deny the mail because I'm apparently on their bad list. Later tonight I can post a mail log entry to show you what I'm seeing. I've requested delisting numerous times but either they're not delisting me or I'm getting put right back on for who knows what reason. 
> 
> As for the newsletter, I was wrong about the newsletter... It's on a separate system and I think it might be ok... If the system generated mails are plain text then that's good... But they will have to have links in them because they're often verification emails or password reset emails or links to subscribed thread updates. 
> 
> Cloudmark supported ISPs are mostly your Internet providers. Gmail does their own verification and I seem to be good with them. 
> 
> Sent from my m8wl using Tapatalk


OK I see. Yeah the blacklist thing is a pain. Hopefully, they will work with you on taking you off. It sounds like once you get them to remove you then it should work as normal.

As for the links for verification and password resets, I've recently taken to using randomly generated 8 digit passcodes that have an expiration time and sending those in the email.  I did this for the specific reason of avoiding links in emails since mail apps like to flag them or disable the links.

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## Robbie

> OK I see. Yeah the blacklist thing is a pain. Hopefully, they will work with you on taking you off. It sounds like once you get them to remove you then it should work as normal.
> 
> As for the links for verification and password resets, I've recently taken to using randomly generated 8 digit passcodes that have an expiration time and sending those in the email.  I did this for the specific reason of avoiding links in emails since mail apps like to flag them or disable the links.


Smart. I need to see if vbulletin supports that. What software are you using? 

I don't typically have any problems on the client side and it seems like cloudmark is the only one I seem to repeatedly have a problem with. It's so frustrating! Thank you all so much for posting ideas in here. Like I said after the kid goes to bed, I'll post a log entry. 

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## Straf

I don't use ISP email as I have my own domains with a hosting package. So I probably won't be much use in testing the emails. But I can PM you an email address you can try sending to.

Is the site hosted on a dedicated server/VPS, or are you hosting it from an ISP's IP pool? Some ISPs reject IP pools automatically. I know AOL used to do that when I ran one of my sites from a server beneath my desk. I was using Exim and that took some tinkering to get it to work in a satisfactory way.

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## Robbie

> I don't use ISP email as I have my own domains with a hosting package. So I probably won't be much use in testing the emails. But I can PM you an email address you can try sending to.
> 
> Is the site hosted on a dedicated server/VPS, or are you hosting it from an ISP's IP pool? Some ISPs reject IP pools automatically. I know AOL used to do that when I ran one of my sites from a server beneath my desk. I was using Exim and that took some tinkering to get it to work in a satisfactory way.


It's a dedicated server running in a data center so it should be a perfectly acceptable ip address. 

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## Straf

I notice that you're using SPF and DKIM but you don't seem to have a DMARC implementation. I can't pretend to know anything about it but it seems to form a holy trinity with the other two and from the brief read I made it seems to be more about anti-phishing.

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## Straf

There's an OpenDMARC addon for Postfix
http://www.postfix.org/addon.html

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## Slylok

> Smart. I need to see if vbulletin supports that. What software are you using? 
> 
> I don't typically have any problems on the client side and it seems like cloudmark is the only one I seem to repeatedly have a problem with. It's so frustrating! Thank you all so much for posting ideas in here. Like I said after the kid goes to bed, I'll post a log entry. 
> 
> Sent from my m8wl using Tapatalk


I really only use notepad++  :Very Happy: . I just run an Apache server, create and manage MYSQL databases using PHPMYADMIN then write PHP scripts to handle anything server side. I'm not familiar with vbulletin, but if it is apache based and gives you access to page code and the database tables then it can be done if it doesn't already have that option built in.

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## Robbie

```
Dec 19 21:16:40 cartoguild postfix/smtp[27888]: 70A62920016: host mxzhh.bluewin.ch[195.186.227.50] refused to talk to me: 554 Service unavailable from IP: 64.71.79.207. Please refer to http://csi.cloudmark.com/reset-request/?ip=64.71.79.207 if you feel this is in error
Dec 19 21:16:40 cartoguild postfix/smtp[27888]: 70A62920016: to=<emailremoved>, relay=mxzhb.bluewin.ch[195.186.99.50]:25, delay=420379, delays=420378/0.01/1.2/0, dsn=4.0.0, status=deferred (host mxzhb.bluewin.ch[195.186.99.50] refused to talk to me: 554 Service unavailable from IP: 64.71.79.207. Please refer to http://csi.cloudmark.com/reset-request/?ip=64.71.79.207 if you feel this is in error)
```

There's an example...So frustrating.

I'll check out OpenDMARC

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## Slylok

> ```
> Dec 19 21:16:40 cartoguild postfix/smtp[27888]: 70A62920016: host mxzhh.bluewin.ch[195.186.227.50] refused to talk to me: 554 Service unavailable from IP: 64.71.79.207. Please refer to http://csi.cloudmark.com/reset-request/?ip=64.71.79.207 if you feel this is in error
> Dec 19 21:16:40 cartoguild postfix/smtp[27888]: 70A62920016: to=<emailremoved>, relay=mxzhb.bluewin.ch[195.186.99.50]:25, delay=420379, delays=420378/0.01/1.2/0, dsn=4.0.0, status=deferred (host mxzhb.bluewin.ch[195.186.99.50] refused to talk to me: 554 Service unavailable from IP: 64.71.79.207. Please refer to http://csi.cloudmark.com/reset-request/?ip=64.71.79.207 if you feel this is in error)
> ```
> 
> There's an example...So frustrating.
> 
> I'll check out OpenDMARC


Oh yes! It looks like you're going to have to fill out their "IP Statistics Reset Request". Unless something here may be the case. In which you'll probably have to take care of that first. It seems to be legit

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## Straf

An interesting example:

http://mxtoolbox.com/domain/mxzhb.bluewin.ch/

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## Robbie

so, I of course have been submitting de-list requests often through the link in the log entries...which didn't do anything...

Thanks to the link posted by slylok, I actually submitted a support request to cloudmark and they got back to me late last night and said they'd remove the block and sure enough overnight the server sent out a BUNCH of backed up emails, and is now sending flawlessly.  So at this point, as long as everything is set up correctly we should be good...

Thanks for the help...I really just needed some encouragement and a different perspective...because I'm almost certain the server is configured correctly.  We'll see!

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## Robbie

> I can't help on the technical side, but I volunteer to be a Guinea pig 'receiver' for any tests you might want to run


Didn't get to acknowledge this post...Thanks so much Mouse! Nothing to test...yet.

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## Mouse

> Didn't get to acknowledge this post...Thanks so much Mouse! Nothing to test...yet.


LOL!  No worries, Robbie  :Smile: 

I got a bit lost in all the tech speak and went all quiet.  That's all  :Wink:

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## Straf

That's great news Robbie! Even better when you know you don't have to delve into the mail server configuration files. From what I can see from out here is everything is set up as it should be and is responsibly managed. Just keep an eye on updates, especially security ones. The bad side of open source is the code is available and exploits can be found. The good side of open source is the code is available and exploits can be quickly patched by the community.

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## Slylok

Excellent! Well done sirs

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## Robbie

I wanted to report, I just checked the logs again, and it looks like we're still going strong.  This means that the regular link to request a delist from cloudmark gets ignored, and if you open a ticket, they get to you within 24 hours.  Best I can tell our server is still sending site mail.

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## Mouse

Well I'm getting snowballs of stuff from all the threads I've had an involvement with at any time (and that's quite a few with the city thing in progress), so its all working fine from where I'm standing.

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