Forum email messages rejected as spam

[Gryzor]

Hello people,

To begin, here's my setup: my forum (2.0.18 ) sends emails via SMTP and through privateemail.com (that's a service provided by my registrar, namecheap.com). Lately an increasing percentage of emails gets bounced back to me, routinely with the message:

The mail system

<recipient email>: host prod-pelbout-c-phx.jellyfish.systems[63.250.43.118]
said: 554 5.7.1 Rejected due to high probability of spam (in reply to end
of DATA command)

So it seems like jellyfish obviously has suspicions. 

My problem is twofold:
-there seems to be no way to tell jellyfish that hey, those are legitimate, like you can do with other blocking mechanisms. But this is not SMF-related
-the service provider, namecheap, say they can't help me because I can't provide them with a complete email as it was sent (complete with headers) since those emails are not saved anywhere.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

[a10]

Would say neamecheap's email server ip is in some antispam blacklist(s) used by the recipient domain, maybe more or less correctly listed there due to some namecheap customers sending much real spam. But blacklisting complete servers = heavy colateral damage. May last for days, weeks or months, until the ip is more or less randomly removed from some lists here and there. Later on, server relisted etc etc.

Maybe try using SMTP mail for the forum.  For PHP \ one's home domain services, no real solution apart from navigating around it. At my place, refusing any registrations done with aol (US), btinternet (UK) & bigpond (AU) email, those 3 were 99.9% of the problem, all applying some ridiculously defective antispam measures. Then asking the new member to re-register using, quote, "a reliable & trustworthy email service provider".

And needed to make any existing members using those 3 email services change their profile email, was getting lots of bounced PM notifications.

Adds to the joy and satisfaction of running a forum ;O)
btw, never ever seen any problem whatsoever with gmail, yahoo, outlook etc.

[rcane]

I've got a namecheap domain that had HUGE issues doing a mail marketing through namasteLight.

Took a careful combing on the CNAME records, DKIM, spf, etc to clean it.  Someone didn't put a correct record somewhere and we got blacklisted on a few places.

We also found Apple accounts were the biggest blockers due to some new restrictions Apple put into place regarding 'bulk' mail; also iOS 15 has some mail privacy settings users should check.

I had to send a report request into Apple to have them review my mail servers to have them stop blocking our things.  Took a few days for them to respond.

Hope that's a start.

[Gryzor]

Thanks for the replies, guys. So if I get this correctly jellyfish suspects my domain because the originating ip may have included known spammers, always a cool thing to deal with

Not sure there's much I can do myself with Namecheap and privateemail - DKIM and anti-spoof is already in place (ironically they offer Jellyfish-based protection  ).

Now, regarding the big players, today I even found out that a message failed to be delivered to my own, *gmail* account. here's the full reply:

This is the mail system at host NEW-01-4.privateemail.com.

I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not
be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below.

For further assistance, please send mail to [email protected]

If you do so, please include this problem report. You can
delete your own text from the attached returned message.

The mail system

<[email protected]>: host prod-pelbout-c-phx.jellyfish.systems[63.250.43.118]
said: 554 5.7.1 Rejected due to high probability of spam (in reply to end
of DATA command)

Does that mean Gmail also relies on Jellyfish, which I'd find weird, or is there something else going on?

Shall I take it there's no way to actually capture the outgoing emails?

...oh, and if you can suggest an alternative email service I'd be grateful

[Gryzor]

Hahaha I just realised that Jellyfish is a Namecheap product You'd think they could actually remove a valid customer from their blacklists...

But does this mean they're shooting themselves in the foot? I mean they offer email services and on the other hand they offer a service that kills the first service? What on earth?

[rcane]

Hahaha I just realised that Jellyfish is a Namecheap product You'd think they could actually remove a valid customer from their blacklists...

But does this mean they're shooting themselves in the foot? I mean they offer email services and on the other hand they offer a service that kills the first service? What on earth?

that's so they can offer a service to fix the problem.


I found the namecheap customer service to be somewhat lacking.  realtime chats are anything but realtime.  4 or 5 sentence exchanges are guaranteed to be a 45 minute process.

[Gryzor]

In the past Namecheap support has been quite nice for me, even the live chat.  In this case though - disappointed.

Maybe time to look for another provider...

[Steve]

Maybe time to look for another provider...

If you decide to go that route I'd recommend the one that either Kindred or Sir Osis of Liver uses ...

[Gryzor]

Maybe time to look for another provider...

If you decide to go that route I'd recommend the one that either Kindred or Sir Osis of Liver uses ...

Thanks for the suggestion  And these are...?

[Gryzor]

So, yeah, Namecheap support seems to be verging on the 'cheap' side...

I sent them an email that had been blocked; a run-of-the-mill notification:

<username>,

Below is a summary of all activity in your subscribed boards and topics at CPCWiki forum today. To unsubscribe please visit the link below.
https://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/profile/?area=notification;u=34


Regards,
The CPCWiki forum Team.

Their reply?

According to our technical team investigation, the email you have tried to send cannot be whitelisted this time. Please try to change the content of the emails to avoid facing this issue in the future. Also, please check this article to get additional information: https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/9984/2216/why-emails-go-to-spam-and-what-to-do/

I'm pulling my hair out.

[shawnb61]

IIRC, some folks have had luck in similar situations simply aligning domains across the forum & sender.

E.g., if your forum is myforum.org, don't send the email from [email protected]...

[Gryzor]

Yes that's a good point, but I'm sending it through the same domain indeed... The email service is attached to the specific domain, so it's a pretty straightforward setup.

[Sesquipedalian]

CNAME records, DKIM, spf, etc

This is where the solution lies, yes.

Apart from mentioning this to you, there's not much that we can do to help you with that, because the problem isn't anything that can be controlled or affected by your forum settings. You will need to talk to your email service provider's support team to resolve this.

[Sir Osis of Liver]

Maybe time to look for another provider...

If you decide to go that route I'd recommend the one that either Kindred or Sir Osis of Liver uses ...

Thanks for the suggestion And these are...?

Kindred has had good experience with icdsoft.  I've moved approx. 20 forums to Crocweb.  Both are very good.

[Gryzor]

CNAME records, DKIM, spf, etc

This is where the solution lies, yes.

Apart from mentioning this to you, there's not much that we can do to help you with that, because the problem isn't anything that can be controlled or affected by your forum settings. You will need to talk to your email service provider's support team to resolve this.

Oh yes, I know. As I said, it was very much not a SMF problem; my actual question concerning SMF was about outgoing emails. Then again I was sure I would find some very real help here

Kindred has had good experience with icdsoft.  I've moved approx. 20 forums to Crocweb.  Both are very good.

Crocweb doesn't seem to offer an email service by itself, but icdsoft does  I'll check them out!! Thanks for the suggestion!

[a10]

In this context, let me mention one.com, been there 12 years now with 2 domains and forums, things simply work.

[Gryzor]

In this context, let me mention one.com, been there 12 years now with 2 domains and forums, things simply work.

Ah thanks, much appreciated, will check them out!

[Gryzor]

Ah darn, icdsoft doesn't offer whois privacy (or DNS???) for .eu domains... bummer.

[Gryzor]

Thought I'd give an update.

So after all a user alerted me to this discussion: https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/175147/jellyfish-by-namecheap . From there I went to the Reddit thread where I posted and a wonderful guy from Namecheap followed up with my ticket and had it resolved for me. My domain is now (presumably) whitelisted, so a happy ending, but:

-who on earth designs a blocking mechanism without an appeal/whitelisting process?
-who on earth imposes a beta service that negatively affects performance of other services on their clients?
-who on earth designs such a service with no logging features?

Anyhow, for now things look good...

[Steve]

Marking solved then. If the issue reoccurs feel free to un-mark it.

[Gryzor]

Yeah, forgot to mark it myself, sorry.

[Steve]

No worries.