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Comment by devereaux | Hacker News Reader

I have a mail server hosted at Linode on:

- a clean IP, not on RBL, not blacklisted elsewhere to the best of my knowledge (outlook.com tells you when you IP is bad)

- also accessible on IPv6

- both IPs having a proper rDNS on my domain

- supporting SSL on port 487 and 565, with a certificate from a known authority

- with DKIM and SPF both passing according to gmail

Yet it ends up in gmail spam folder. And I'm only sending email to myself and 2 other persons, so it's not even mass mailing.

I think there are other factors at play.

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Google wants you to do special things for them. Have you gone to https://postmaster.google.com and set up your domain there?

This was first mentioned on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9905767

(I'm hoping I won't have to partake in this.)

Yes, and even if the tools are not available perhaps the domain verification would help.

I really would have hoped that Google would try to live without asking people to link domains to Google accounts. At least that's what I understand they are doing here. If so, this is a step towards their interest, not ours, and their slogan "don't be evil" pales more every day. Yes, of course some newer competitors of theirs are leading this course by attempting to win over people to their own closed messaging worlds, and users at large don't care, so all of this is sad. (The language on their blog post about this (linked from the mentioned post) is laden with a disappointing amount of weasel words, too.)

So what I'm saying is, no, I don't want to link my domains to my Google account just so that I can send mails to them. And I'm going to hold out hoping that their systems are collecting enough trust in my domains and/or IP addresses in other ways so that it won't be necessary.

Depending on who it is, maybe you can give the people you want to email mailboxes on your own domain?

Thanks, that is super helpful!

I discovered the following for outlook.com: https://postmaster.live.com/snds/index.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0

Are there similar tools for aol.com, yahoo.com and icloud.com? (to basically cover the big 5)

If you do find a tool for aol, let us know. They are the most obtuse when it comes to rejecting emails.

No. Creating an account for every domain I want to send email to is not scaleable.

I was in a very similar position and found all my email bounced by every Cisco Ironport user. Contacting Cisco gave me the usual "please stop sending spam" sort of answer.

I then had a customer who actually had a Cisco support agreement log a case, and was promptly informed that I needed to create an account on abuse.net and register our domain to resolve the issue. I did, and it immediately resolved the issue.

It's a frustrating, terrible situation, where you follow every possible best practice you can find, and you're at the mercy of a third party you've never heard of. I get that RBLs are a similar situation, but you can usually identify when that's a cause.

I've had this recur over the years with 5-6 other domains, but there doesn't seem to be any pattern to it, it certainly isn't an issue with every domain.

That must be heart-breaking and very frustrating. You've done everything you can do to be a good internet citizen and support all the proper technology, but you're still treated badly.

If I am correct, gmail now defaults to a "don't trust an IP by default" procedure. If enough people get your emails in a spam folder and mark it as not being spam, the system will start trusting the IP address. It also has to do with volume.

This might be a good service offering.

If someone could operate a few hundred gmail accounts, they could let people send them messages and mark those messages as not being spam in order to train the filters.

Such accounts would be permanently disabled. Spammers have been trying to use sock-puppet networks for years.

I haven't checked in a while, but sometimes a free service like Sendgrid can help. Send 12,000 emails per month free and the stats are pretty cool. PS: I have no affiliation with them :-) I just looked and they have source code posted on the homepage, "You can send email over SMTP or HTTP..."

Check PBL too

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