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Best practices for sending e-mail

Anyone have tips on the best way to format/build our transactional e-mails to prevent them from being blocked?

We had our transactional e-mails blocked temporarily the other day by Comcast thinking our mailing IP is a spammer. HostingRails quickly fixed it, but I'm wondering if there's anything else we can do to decrease the probability of it happening again.

Anyone using Sender ID? What about DomainKeys? Is it possible to have our e-mails signed with DomainKeys in a shared host environment? Can the MTA do it automatically for us?

I've heard that if you're sending mail between users, you should either add a Sender: field with an e-mail for the site or put the site e-mail in the From: and change the Reply-to: to the originating user.

Any other ideas? We're sending mail through the MTA rather then directly over SMTP since we want the reliability that the MTA offers (retries, etc.).

Thanks,

Maurice

2008-05-08 05:28 AM

Yes, we can never avoid the situation on a shared server environment. But we can decrease the probability of this issue from happening again. As a first step we are going to harden the PHP installation on your server. I.E we will be modifying PHP and will make this su-exec.

This means that nobody mails send using php scripts will be blocked. This should cause drastic improvement on over-riding the current situation. We are scheduling this process as soon as possible.

DomainKeys is an e-mail authentication system designed to verify the DNS domain of an e-mail sender and the message integrity. Also new Cpanel version supports setting Domain Keys for domains hosted on a shared environment. I checked the server where you  are currently having the account and this can be achieved on your account.

There are three primary advantages of this system for e-mail recipients:

   1] It allows the originating domain of an e-mail to be positively identified, allowing domain-based blacklists and whitelists to be more effective. This is also likely to make phishing attacks easier to detect.

   2] It allows forged e-mail messages to be discarded on sight, either by end-user e-mail software (mail user agents), or by ISPs' mail transfer agents.

   3] It allows abusive domain owners to be tracked more easily.

There are some incentives for mail senders to authenticate outgoing e-mail:

   1] It allows a great reduction in abuse desk work for DomainKeys-enabled domains if e-mail receivers use the DomainKeys system to automatically drop forged e-mail messages claiming to be from that domain.

   2] The domain owner can then focus their abuse team energies on their own users who actually are abusing their use of that domain.

2008-05-08 02:11 PM

Regards,
Rahul
Thanks, Rahul. You guys have the best support I've ever seen :)

I found the DomainKeys option in cpanel. When I go to enable it it says: "Enabled, WARNING: DomainKeys cannot be used because this server is not a DNS server for babyblogger.com"

How should we proceed?

Thanks,

Maurice

2008-05-08 07:48 PM

I have manually run the script on the server and added DomainKeys entry to the domains zone file.

2008-05-08 07:55 PM

Regards,
Rahul

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