On Sat, Apr 2, 2016 at 9:07 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
GMail is being flaky as hell about accepting or not accepting email from the RW server, 173.255.233.133 - sometimes works, sometimes hits spam, sometimes gets 550 refused (with no particular reason given). Google doesn't do customer service, of course.
We don't *seem* to be in the email blackhole lists (I see our IP 173.255.233.133 gets 6 DNSBL hits in http://www.kloth.net/services/dnsbl.php but I go to the sites in question and they say it's not listed); so the only other hypothesis that springs to mind is that they don't like email coming from J. Random Linode VM (and at least one DNSBL does consider that a reason). Has SPF/DMARC helped anyone with this sort of thing?
What does one do in this case? Is there e.g. a commercial third-party email relay service that, say, GMail users will get mail from?
Hi David,
You absolutely should setup/configure SPF, DKIM and DMARC so that your domain is authenticated. (See below for links)
Even with those things set appropriately, you might just find that a 3rd party sender will be the only way to get reliable delivery; especially if you're hosting on a VM (e.g. Linode, Digital Ocean) rather than a full dedicated server with static IP that you know is "clean".
Also, Google as a transport (using them for SMTP relay) is not a good idea. I know for a fact that as a paying Google Apps customer (with only two paid seats), I'm unable to send more than ~90 messages per hour. So, I'm moving to a 3rd party like SendGrid, MailGun etc.
Finally, and not least of all, MediaWiki apparently still has a crufty internal email system. I haven't given these a try (because my mailing issue is with CiviCRM), but check out these extensions. (Read commentary on the SwiftMailer extension page)
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SwiftMailer https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Mailgun
I've wrtitten up everything in my journey to better email delivery
https://freephile.org/wiki/Email https://freephile.org/wiki/Email_Marketing https://freephile.org/wiki/SPF https://freephile.org/wiki/DKIM https://freephile.org/wiki/DMARC
Greg Rundlett https://eQuality-Tech.com https://equality-tech.com/ https://freephile.org