Qmail and hotmail not playing nice

[TongueTied]

I am having a problem sending email to hotmail users from my QMR setup. When I send mail to a hotmail account, it goes into their junk mail folder. I see that hotmail advises not to have a virus scanner on your outbound mail and I don’t as I have tcp.smtp set to allow local users to bypass qmail-scanner-queue. The second suggestion is to sort out your DNS entries. This may be the problem I am having but I will describe everything after I put in a message header taken from an email I sent to a hotmail account. To avoid addresses being picked up from this post, I have modified the header to hide the addresses and servers.

MIME-Version: 1.0
Received: from mail.mydomain.info ([210.19.194.98]) by bay0-mc10-f2.bay0.hotmail.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.1830); Fri, 2 Jun 2006 00:14:15 -0700
Received: (qmail 28123 invoked by uid 1031); 2 Jun 2006 15:12:48 +0800
Received: from b777.mylocaldomain.office (HELO b777) (my.name@mydomain.info@192.168.1.12) by mail.mydomain.info with SMTP; 2 Jun 2006 15:12:48 +0800
X-Message-Info: txF49lGdW433KH88hOu/qOLQsPwuH/Q6mPmEzCB/RVo=
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1807
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1807
Return-Path: my.name@mydomain.info
X-OriginalArrivalTime: 02 Jun 2006 07:14:15.0235 (UTC) FILETIME=[27D49930:01C68614]


I have used GoDaddy.com to register the domain and have listed my mail.mydomain.info as an A record. Initially, I had it as a CNAME but gather you can’t do that so I removed the CNAME and entered mail to my fixed ip in the A records. I can telnet to mail.hotmail.com on port 25 as they say is necessary. The reverse PTR record is set correctly and I get response I think is correct from dnsstuff.com and dnsreport.com.

I have been racking my brain trying to figure this out. Nothing I do seems to work as ensure that email sent to hotmail addresses goes into their inbox rather than their junk mail folders. Is anyone else having this problem? Is there a solution?

[Pebcak]

Its not a qmail/dns problem but a hotmail one. Tweak your filters on the Hotmail account until it stops going to the junk folder.

[TongueTied]

Problem is, it is a general problem. It doesn't matter who the recipient is, if they have a hotmail account then anything sent from my server will go to their junk mail folder. What I have found is that many people don’t even realise they have a junk mail folder in their hotmail account or that they can tweak the filter on their hotmail account. What I find is that those hotmail users claim I never sent them the email even though I know I did. I advise them to check their junk mail folder but hotmail graciously empties their junk mail folders automatically and unsolicited every few days. So, as far as they are concerned, I never sent it. very frustrating!

[rocky180]

Hi,

We have many domains and found that hotmail had done exactly the same to all our websites because 2 years ago our IP was blacklisted as an open relay.

Anyways after trying their suggestions on changing DNS stuff I decided to try and find an alternative as that also did not appear to work and everything was going the the junk mail folder.

I beleive I sorted the problem by getting all my friends that have hotmail accounts including myself and sending multiple emails all from my various domains to them and myself.

Then asking them to please click on the link THIS IS NOT SPAM.

After a few months all my domains now appear in the Inbox even for new users that have hotmail accounts that I send emails to them.

I think hotmail must have some sort of logic in place that if a certain number of people are marking their emails as THIS IS NOT SPAM then they must listen and in our case they did.

Justin.

[TongueTied]

Justin,
I think you are on to something there. I contacted Hotmail and have had a lengthy email exchange with them but no real results the only suggestion they had was that I should sign up for a white-listing service offered by an MS partner. The service is designed around mailing lists who want to pay to ensure that their mailing list arrive. The cost of the service starts at US$1000 per annum!!! I have a grand total to 23 users on 3 domains and no mailing lists, so sorry but I'm not about to pay US$1000 per annum just so 23 people can email their friends every once and a while. They must be nuts! Anyway, I gather that AOL is worse.

I'll try your suggestion but I think the numbers of users I have is a bit small to get Hotmail's logic to recognise the volume. But, I'll try. Thanks for the suggestion.
Cheers,

[cooltool]

http://forum.qmailrocks.org/showthread.php?t=4904

look at that thread this should fix your hotmail problem.
I had the same.

http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/safety/content/technologies/senderid/wizard/default.aspx
Microsoft provides a tool to create the necessary SPF DNS record.

once I had that on my mail domains it worked right away!

[TongueTied]

I have an SPF record and reverse PTR record and still no joy.