Drupal Generated Email is Considered Spam

Posted by parkeug on August 4, 2007 at 8:24pm

When a user registers or requests a password on our new Drupal installation, the resulting automatically generated email is caught by the user's email spam filters (Gmail and Yahoo) and the email never makes it to the user's inbox.

The strange thing is that if I change the text of the generated email in User Settings to contain only a few words, the email makes it through to the inbox. However, when using the default messages, a message with nothing but a URL link, or a message with more than one or two sentences, the email is caught by the spam filters again. I am completely perplexed.

I have seen other posts on this topic, but I have been unable to find a solution for this particular problem. I have tried installing the SMTP module... test emails go through fine, but the autogenerated emails do not.

I have tested this on 5.1 and 5.2 on a VPS running Sendmail and hosting multiple domain names, if that makes any difference.

Does anybody know what might be causing this problem? Thank you in advance for any advice you may be able to offer.

Comments

=-=

Posted by VM on August 4, 2007 at 8:27pm

you do have an email address set in administer -> site information ?
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
give a person a fish and you feed them for a day but ... teach a person to fish and you feed them for a lifetime

Hi, thanks for the quick

Posted by parkeug on August 4, 2007 at 8:29pm

Hi, thanks for the quick reply. Yes, I do have that set correctly to admin@mydomainname.com, which is a valid mailbox.

user-side filters

Posted by tm on August 4, 2007 at 8:52pm

is it ALL auto-gen'd messaging with longer text, or only the account-related stuff?

the link might be related to anti-phishing filters; don't give a mail user a "link" to click through (wonder if this breaks the "one-time" thingy). the longer messages may also be related to anti-phishing, if the spam-filters are looking for patterns, like "please verify your account/password" stuff.

the good news is, you are getting messages through sometimes, so your mail domain(s) has(are) not been blacklisted by an rbl.

hmm, have to test this.

Send a mesg to support

Posted by humble on August 4, 2007 at 8:56pm

I get this a lot especially with a new site on a fresh VPS. Solution is to send a personal mesg to Gmail (Yahoo, etc.) support asking them to whitelist your IP/domain.

~ http://noosworx.com ~

tis complicated

Posted by sepeck on August 5, 2007 at 12:54am

Without the message header information it is very difficult to guess correctly.
1. Is your ip address or domain on any known spam lists? You can check on www.dnsstuff.com
2. Do you have an spf record for your domain? openspf.org

There was a formatting issue for smtp mail that was fixed a few months ago and included in 5.2.

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain}

Could it be due to html formated emails

Posted by STNyborg on November 6, 2008 at 8:48am

I still have this problem on one site, where user's request password emails are caught by spam mail filters.

I have learned that the emails have been formated as html emails, and cannot figure out how to turn this off on system emails.

=-=

Posted by VM on November 7, 2008 at 11:35pm

AFAIK drupal doesn't do HTML by default which modules are you using that affect email?

I'm having this same

Posted by merzikain on October 18, 2010 at 8:32pm

I'm having this same problem.

The full headers I get in yahoo are as follows:

X-Apparently-To: myaddress@yahoo.com via 206.190.38.66; Wed, 29 Sep 2010 10:55:29 -0700
Return-Path:
X-YahooFilteredBulk: ipaddress
Received-SPF: none (mta1156.mail.sk1.yahoo.com: domain of originatingaddress@domain.com does not designate permitted sender hosts)
X-YMailISG: JP3fl4QcZAofT0kfnjWWhOLWdcgmHoDtPoFqmvCn6FgLvKS5 lXvWvinEedzK3b0a_fI0q6_uf..Dv20CJo5PNBSw9OKw_j6a_8GQz0OAgTxz 23UOUYRe.5aVCTwHLbx5NRjqdMA4rYv2jxJH3YVa4B8b0vjwxAIxId0rnfDP FFsDHAznbdr0yj7lLRyERxa4fdt21cRxnN2537tX6LQkEjinBkvnXVLNNIPC 0hqc55Ril06f8Gm0_RlmNPaRDt7pQ0_xj6VJnxnNEhLieSmw5YcLdL8dr53I 68XBGMGQZONgQoAFNFLUQaN_t_Gb031r_enW0_KXLh_iSHnPeSbGldajqotS RZKNsIYg_fZ3zm65PoT7c8E6wjeSU88Nt_qks8rgOahQ9c_VuCALA2MLcdoP oeJQM6wh7A5oIzv4UZxosdpGtvjOjw3qPZC4RuWrbBD_uY_F1DlArMPlfTij s15YNVBqBJZK7d6tZL_Iym38ccHtvejEOw--
X-Originating-IP: [ipaddress]
Authentication-Results: mta1156.mail.sk1.yahoo.com from=domain.com; domainkeys=neutral (no sig); from=domain.com; dkim=neutral (no sig)
Received: from 127.0.0.1 (EHLO domain.com) (ipaddress) by mta1156.mail.sk1.yahoo.com with SMTP; Wed, 29 Sep 2010 10:55:29 -0700
Received: from 279076-www2 ([ipaddress]) by domain.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.4675); Wed, 29 Sep 2010 12:55:28 -0500
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2010 12:55:28 -0500
Subject: Thank you for contacting us
To: myaddress@yahoo.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed; delsp=yes
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8Bit
X-Mailer: Drupal Webform (PHP/5.2.13)
Errors-To: originatingaddress@domain.com
Return-Path: originatingaddress@domain.com
Sender: originatingaddress@domain.com
From: "Site Name" Add sender to Contacts
Message-ID: <279076-WWW2YzZKJJmF0000000a@domain.com>
X-OriginalArrivalTime: 29 Sep 2010 17:55:28.0547 (UTC) FILETIME=[80631F30:01CB5FFF]
Content-Length: 475

Any email being sent from originatingaddress@domain.com from my email client gets through just fine to anyone I send to. But some recipients don't receive the message if sent from drupal. This is mainly a problem with new users not getting their verification email. This happens both when the user signs themselves up and when we create an account for a user.

Two separate sites, both using drupal 6.x, have this problem. I have not heard of any other similar issue with server generated emails with any of the other non-drupal sites we have.

The server that all of the sites are on have been under our control for years in terms of domain and one set of ip's. However, there was a new server purchased with a new ip earlier this year and we just recently have begun using it so it could possibly be that the ip was previously used by a spammer.

But let's assume for now that it wasn't (I'm having IT investigate that...), what else could be the problem with these messages being flagged as spam?

I have a message on our contact and sign up forms that specify that they should add sender@domain.com to their address book to keep the messages from being sent to their spam/junk folder but I don't want to rely on that.

I have requested that IT add the email addresses I'm using for auto responses to the server so they're not dead ends in case a recipient's email server tries to validate the account in some way. So far nothing has been done for this so I know that one address does not exist but is being used to send these messages.

I can't think of anything else to share about this issue. Any ideas/suggestions are more than welcome and if you need more info please let me know and I'll provide what I can.

Thanks