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Exim email going to spam

foggle
Good afternoon, I have a problem where email from any PHP scripts are (it seems) consistently going into spam folders in clientside email software even though the headers say they are passing SPF and the server is a permitted sender. X-Antivirus and X-AntiAbuse headers are added and none are complaining. I have checked RBL and the server IP's aren't blacklisted. The only thing I can think is that is causing a problem is that the server (sub domain) name is completely different from the domain the email is coming from. But I would think this is normal on multi-domain hosted servers such as mine. Can anyone point me in the right direction to solve this please, some of my clients are starting to get restless and I don't know how to solve this. Many thanks for any wisdom you can offer. Will

Comments

6 comments

Date Votes
  • cPanelMichael
    Hello, First, ensure your server is following the guidelines documented at: How to Keep your Email out of the Spam Folder - cPanel Knowledge Base - cPanel Documentation If so, could you post an example of the message headers from one of the affected messages? Ensure you replace real domain names and IP addresses with examples. Thank you.
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  • ruzbehraja
    You could also use something like www.mail-tester.com to check the spaminess of your emails. It could also be a long HTML signature or a lot of numbers or 0000 $$$$$ in your email body.
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  • foggle
    Ah. We're not using DMARC. We have SPF and PTR on all DNS, but the mail() isnt authenticated so presumably that is a problem. Will try to DMARC and report back. Thank you both.
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  • cPanelMichael
    We have SPF and PTR on all DNS, but the mail() isnt authenticated so presumably that is a problem.

    I suggest ensuring the PHP script uses SMTP authentication. Not using SMTP authentication can result in this problem, regardless of if DMARC is enabled. Thank you.
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  • foggle
    Thanks Michael and rusbehraja. I have vastly improved this by using dmarcian and adding the DMARC records in DNS. SMTP Auth will presumably bypass all of this but isn't possible in all our use cases. Last question on this topic; should one be trying to match the hostname in the email message headers to the domain name of the cPanel account that is sending the email? Here is an example of a header envelope, where; cpanel-user is the username of the cpanel account server.host.com is the hostname of this shared multidomain server example.com is the actual website domain name Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=pass (google.com: domain of cpanel-user@server.host.com designates 1.2.3.4 as permitted sender) smtp.mailfrom=cpanel-user@server.host.com; dmarc=fail (p=NONE dis=NONE) header.from=example.com Received: from cpanel-user by server.host.com with local (Exim 4.87) (envelope-from <cpanel-user@server.host.com>) id 1cJNZ6-006u8Q-UW for contact@example.com; Tue, 20 Dec 2016 00:00 To: contact@example.com
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  • cPanelMichael
    Last question on this topic; should one be trying to match the hostname in the email message headers to the domain name of the cPanel account that is sending the email?

    Since you are sending without SMTP authenticaiton, the message is actually coming from $cpanel-username@$server-hostname as opposed to the individual domain name. You can find additional discussion of this topic at: E-mail Return-Path, envelope and dkim domain are set to the root domain Thank you.
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