
Does anyone know how you avoid sending emails to hotmail going to spam? - immad

======
dpapathanasiou
Register your server (the one sending email) with SenderID
<http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/safety/technologies/senderid/overview.mspx>
which is an MS invention -- their record wizard is here:
<http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/safety/content/technologies/senderid/wizard/>

The rest of the world (at least those email servers that check for this stuff)
uses SPF records.

This site <http://www.openspf.org/> tells you how to setup SPF on your server.

~~~
immad
sounds promising. We have SPF setup. Going to check out SenderID now. Thanks

------
willg
I do not think that there is "one way" to fix this (if there were, then it
would be easy for spammers to go straight to inboxes)

Reverse DNS (ip mail domain)

SPF Record

Sender ID

3rd party verification (goodmail systems is one example linked from aol's spam
abuse) - they are $400. 80k sounds like a little bit too much

Apply to be "whitelisted" at each specific provider
(<http://help.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/mail/cgi_bulkmail> is yahoos, aol has
one)

Switch MTAs (postfix, sendmail, qmail) - try alternating

Make sure your headers make sense and are valid (reply-to,return-path, from,
message-id, etc)

Finally, send email people actually want. It seems that the systems are
somewhat automated (aol is for sure) to reject mail if a certain % of users
flag it as spam.

------
knome
Make sure you have reverse DNS that points at your mail server ( eg mail.your-
site.com ) , not just the root domain ( eg not your-site.com ). A lack of
reverse DNS or an automatically generated reverse DNS ( eg isp-1-0-0-127.isp-
site.net ) won't do.

------
immad
I have talked to a few other people and they have had similar problems,
thought someone here might have a solution. Basically we are using Qmail to
send emails out from our website (ruby on rails). Everything seems to be
working except for hotmail, where they always go to spam.

We are using a hacky solution at the moment but that limits how many emails we
can send, does someone have a good way around this, paying a small price per
month wouldn't be too bad for a solution.

------
lupin_sansei
Are you sure it's not due to how your email headers and content look? I had to
remove my X-Mailer "Mail-Sender" and supply a proper address with a name
before Hotmail would stop putting the emails into spam.

------
sabat
I may have some information about this, but it's a little bit crude. It comes
from Adam Curry's Daily Source Code podcast, when he was first setting up his
startup Podshow and was having similar troubles (and not just with Hotmail --
all the webmail providers!).

Btw, the first thing I would do is get SenderID working. It will work with
almost everything -- sendmail and postfix at least, so I'd bet that it works
with qmail too.

According to what Adam says he found, you have to be registered with some sort
of clearing house or all the webmail providers will drop you as spam. This is
not senderid or spf. The only efficient way to be 'registered' is to purchase
and appliance from a company for upwards of $80K. I think this includes
configuring it with your domain info as well.

I wish my 'info' was not so vague. It comes from 1+ years ago, and Adam was
never super-clear about specifics. It always sounded a little weird to me, but
OTOH I do believe the webmail providers would do this. Apparently, it's done
in the name of anti-spam, but the spammers are allowed to buy these
appliances, so it's really about milking more money from emailers, and maybe
about squeezing out the little guy.

I'm hoping someone out there can clear some of this up, because it's a problem
we all potentially face (if it's real).

