[rossagrant]

Hi guys,

I created a separate thread earlier regarding the failure of my activation emails to hit Hotmail inboxes. They seem to hit junk all the time and it’s killing my sign ups.

I have set Domain Keys, SPF and RDNS and I can see these in the email headers when I manually send emails from my domain’s cpanel.

However emails generated through PHP such as the activation emails aren’t showing domain keys or SPF in their headers. To be honest though in BOTh scenarios, both with and without these in the headers the emails are still going straight to junk which is frustrating but I was just wondering if I should be seeing the domain keys/ SPF in the php generated emails too?

It would appear that DKIM is important these days and it’s frustrating that CPanel don’t support this yet until version 11.32 which is still weeks off i think.

Do other people experience issues with activation emails and have you managed to sort it out?

It’s tempting to see if there are any alternatoves to CPanel that I can use with BP and assign DKIM already?

One other alternative would be to install Deactivate BP disable activation. I have BP humanity installed which requires registrants to type in the answer to a security question but is that enough to stop spammers if I disable activation?

[Hugo Ashmore]

SPF records are txt entries added to your DNS records. The receiving server i.e the hotmail server will do a DNS lookup for the record to verify that the domain administrator has authorised that a specific host is allowed to send emails on behalf of the domain, as far as I’m aware email headers do not need to acknowledge anything about an SPF record, same with RDNS which simply allows the email server to resolve your domain name back to a server host. RDNS can’t be set by yourself it has to be set at a level above your IP by your host in their records.

Sadly all these mechanisms for verification are considered flawed as they are not foolproof and some like RDNS checks a result of seeing that this record can exist and latching onto it as a means to test by even though it’s not a requirement to have a reverse look up record.

Sounds as though you still have a mismatch somewhere.

Sign me up maybe I can spot something wrong when I can see email headers – ‘hnla at hotmail.com’

[Hugo Ashmore]

Do have to add though – not that it’s any help – checking ones junk mail folders isn’t that hard a thing to do and when you are expecting an email and it doesn’t appear to arrive it’s the first place you would look or should look.

[rossagrant]

Completely agree but it would seem some just don’t do it! My host has enabled dkim through exim and although the email headers for hotmail show dkim as a perm error now they are allowing everything into the inbox!

It just gets more and more bizarre!

[Hugo Ashmore]

Beginning to think that DKIM is the cause of these problems or at least that and combination of something your host is doing, be interesting to see if DKIM were removed entirely from the equation whether RDNS & SPF records were sufficient to placate hurtmail. I certainly have no issues with Hurtmail and haven’t looked into DKIM at all – not sure I greatly like the sound of it tbh.