hotmail senderID

[terryoleary1981]

hi all,

i was having problems with the deliverability to hotmail accounts from one of my ISPConfig domains, i applied to be added to the sendersID and have had confirmation however they included this paragraph in their confirmation email and i'm not sure what it means, can anyone help?

We reviewed your SPF record and note that it includes the "ptr" or reverse DNS lookup mechanism. The specification for SPF records (RFC 4408) discourages use of "ptr" for performance and reliability reasons. This is especially important for Windows Live Mail, Hotmail and other large ISPs as a result of the very high volume of mail we receive each day. We highly recommend you remove the "ptr" mechanism from your SPF record and, if necessary, replace it with other SPF mechanisms that do not require a reverse DNS lookup, such as "a", "mx", "ip4" and "include." This will help ensure that Sender ID validation is performed as accurately as possible, maximizing your email deliverability while protecting your domain from spoofing.

[falko]

What does your SPF record look like?

[terryoleary1981]

in the ispconfig dns manager for the domain my spf record just has:

hostname <empty>

Are emails sent from A Record?: Yes

Are emails sent from MX Record?: Yes

Are emails sent from all servers of this domain?: Yes

Are emails sent from other A Records?: <blank>

Are emails sent from other MX Records?: <blank>

Are emails sent from other IP addresses?: <blank>

Inherit SPF Record from this zone?: <blank>

Do the above entries contain all hosts allowed to send emails for this domain?: Yes

[falko]

Can you also post the output of
dig txt yourdomain.com?

[terryoleary1981]

; <<>> DiG 9.4.2 <<>> txt mydomain.co.uk
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 32396
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 2

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;mydomain.co.uk. IN TXT

;; ANSWER SECTION:
mydomain.co.uk. 86400 IN TXT "v=spf1 a mx ptr ~all"

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
mydomain.co.uk. 86400 IN NS ns1.spongecat.com.
mydomain.co.uk. 86400 IN NS ns2.spongecat.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns1.spongecat.com. 172800 IN A 87.194.223.165
ns2.spongecat.com. 172800 IN A 87.194.223.165

;; Query time: 93 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.1.254#53(192.168.1.254)
;; WHEN: Sat Aug 2 16:34:36 2008
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 146

[falko]

I'd disable the SPF record in ISPConfig and add the line

mydomain.co.uk. 86400 IN TXT "v=spf1 a mx ~all" (no ptr)

manually at the end of the zone file. Restart BIND afterwards.

[terryoleary1981]

next stupid questions.....where's my zone file.

[till]

next stupid questions.....where's my zone file.

That depends on your Linux distribution. On Debian its. e.g. in /etc/bind. Another common location is /var/lib/named

[terryoleary1981]

sorry always forget to say my linux version... its Fedora 7, tried both those locations suggested to no avail.....

[falko]

On Fedora the zone files should be somewhere in /var/named/chroot/ or /var/named/chroot/var/named.

[terryoleary1981]

Thanks for that, seems to have taken the setting, still not sending to hotmail accounts but i think this takes a couple of days to take affect, e.g. for them to update their server..... i think?

[terryoleary1981]

well maybe i was optimistic, still cant send to hotmail, dont have any other problem with yahoo, gmail etc.....

I've been added to the sender id programme and removed the -prt flag from my SPF file, is there anything else i can do?

The postmaster page doesnt seem to offer anymore advice.

[falko]

Have you tried to contact the Hotmail support?

[terryoleary1981]

I've contact hotmail support and got a reply. There are various things i can check and do to improve deliverability. one of them is checking my IP for a bad reputation. When i did this i found it to be blacklisted!

I've looked and the host name my mail comes from is localhost.localdomain which is a postfix setting. I've sorted out my server name to mail.spongecat.com using these instructions which worked. http://cbl.abuseat.org/hostname.html

But need to configure my postfix correctly as it is still coming from localhost.localdomain. i;ve tried setting it in the etc/postfix main config file but with no luck.... tried to follow these http://cbl.abuseat.org/sendmailhelp.html

the line i changed my main config file looks like this:


myhostname = mail.spongecat.com

mydomain = spongecat.com


In my local-host-names I have a long list of all the domain in ISPconfig with localhost, localhost.localdomain, localhost.localhost.localdomain in the top of the list, i tried commenting these out but couldnt receive any emails. FYI spongecat.com is in the list but not mail.spongecat.com

Any ideas?

[terryoleary1981]

i found the line i needed to change it was further up..... it comes from the right domain now! So i can try and delist my ip from this blacklist

Has anyone else had this problem before and managed to get accepted by hotmail, its quite important so i can send emails to hotmail users.