Home > IT Answers > Exchange > How can I check if our company name is “spammish”?
Simplr
155 pts.
 How can I check if our company name is “spammish”?
Delivery failure, Email, Non-Delivery Reports, Spam, Whitelist
I would like to know if there is a way to find out whether or not our company name (domain name) that we use to send out e-mail could be identified as spam. Our domain contains the string "viar" followed bij 2 more letters. I can imagine spam filter software identifying or confusing this with something else, and thus marking the mail as spam. The only pattern I see is that e-mail messages to large international companies seem to NOT arrive. Which is, business-wise extremely annoying (to put it mildly). Note: we have also identified some Exchange server issues, but these generate delivery failure messages back to us, so that we can monitor. In some cases though (say about 3%) we do not receive such a notification, but we also know for a fact that the e-mail hasn't I would like your opinion on this, and also like to find out what we could do about it should this actually be the case. Thanks in advance, Ronald

Software/Hardware used:
ASKED: October 27, 2008  9:38 AM
UPDATED: November 10, 2008  2:18 PM
RELATED QUESTIONS
Answer Wiki:
One thing to be sure to do is to create a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) DNS record. Look at these resources below. We had also had the same issue with our e-mail getting rejected and further investigation showed the recipient organizations were doing SPF record lookups. If that record did not exist, then the email was deleted without any errors to the sender.
Last Wiki Answer Submitted:  May 30, 2013  7:08 pm  by  Labnuke99   32,720 pts.
All Answer Wiki Contributors:  Labnuke99   32,720 pts. , Michael Tidmarsh   14,000 pts.
To see all answers submitted to the Answer Wiki: View Answer History.


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Labnuke99, so we meet again in another thread. Thanks for your reply, very useful. As we’re still stuck with our good ol’ system administrators and Exchange 2003 I’ll try to convince them to have a look at this.

I’m still preparing a migration to Google Apps For Your Domain, but wasn’t sure if that would solve every issue. For a test I have setup one e-mail address to send through GAFYD (so without changing MX records on the domain, just sending through smtp.gmail.com) and still suspected not all mails came through. Just a temp solution that works from the gmail webinterface and MAYBE through MS Outlook. It then still uses the same ISP and Exchange server I think, but that’s beyond my knowledge.

Mail send through the webinterface arrived at each recipient that previously indicated they hadn’t received anything.

Man I’m getting dizzy with all this ;-)

Will keep you updated, thanks a bunch again!

Simplr
 155 pts.
 

Glad to be of assistance anytime.

The DNS stuff is on the outside of your organization. Whoever maintains you DNS service will have to make the changes for the public. This would not be any changes on the Exchange 2003 system.

Sounds like you have done some good testing. Keep up the good work.

Labnuke99
 32,720 pts.
 

Labnuke99 (or anyone else interested ;-)

I have the test results from that SPF link, I’ve uploaded 2 pdf’s that contain the reply e-mail text from the test. Does it make any sense?

spf test results from spf-test@openspf.org:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/7608450/spf-test-results-from-spftestopenspforg
note: I added some text to translate some Dutch.

and

spf test results from check-auth@verifier.port2 5.com:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/7608452/spf-test-results-from-checkauthverifierport25com
where I replaced names and domains with “my.name” and “ourdomain”

Would appreciate it if someone could have a look at them.

Thanks in advance!
simplr

Simplr
 155 pts.
 

Sorry, hyperlinks are messed up:

spf test results from spf-test@openspf.org

and

spf test results from check-auth@verifier.port2 5.com

hope this will be ok, can’t edit a message once sent.

Simplr
 155 pts.
 

still a mess, but the links are working. Now seems to be a good time to read “How to use this text editor” lol

Simplr
 155 pts.
 

You need to have your DNS manager create a SPF record that looks something like:

domain.com. IN TXT “v=spf1 ip4:xx.xx.xx.xx ~all”

where the xx.xx.xx.xx is an authorized IP address or address range for sending messages from your domain. Until this DNS record is created, the SPF tests will fail.

Labnuke99
 32,720 pts.
 

Labnuke99,

any idea how long it will take for the changes to take effect, once they’ve created the SPF record?

thanks in advance,
Ronald

Simplr
 155 pts.
 

And more …

you’ve seen the e-mails (see earlier posts) that were returned by the spf validation services.

When I check again using this service I get other results.

The mailserver(s) are listed as mail.ourdomain.nl and MX2.hostingcompany.nl where the hosting company is just where our domain – website is hosted. They do NOT manage our Exchange Server (as you can see in the e-mails, the mail server is recognised as something dsl.concepts.nl

Luckily, I can manage the domain stuff and probably can create an SPF record.

But which “host” is crucial? where we host our domain and website, or our exchange server.

lot of questions again, I am so tired of this. Just about to toss out the whole exchange server and go for GAFYD,

thanks again,
Ronald

Simplr
 155 pts.
 

The critical server for the SPF DNS record is the server SENDING the email messages. This is the server that receiving servers want to confirm belongs to your company and is authorized to send messages on behalf of the domain. Sorry it took so long to get back to you. I was on vacation.

Labnuke99
 32,720 pts.