Hi all,

I have a comment section on my site that emails me a notification when a comment is posted; it has been functioning perfectly for about 2 months. Recently I noticed that my comments had dropped so sharply, actually, "no one seems to comment any more!"

In fact, my notifications where just being detoured into my spam box all of a sudden.

Any idea why this would happen? How can I make sure this doesn't happen should I need to get in touch with my users in the future?

Aside from that specific question, is there any recommended reading on how to use mail() appropriately with your users and not get labeled/blacklisted as spam? (I'll do some searching on my own as well)

Thanks!
-Nicky

Without going into the gory details...

1) Is the email script secure enough? Anyone abusing it lately?

2) Does your script put the commenter's email address in the From: field? That might make somebody suspect you're relaying email from all sorts of people. Relays are not welcome these days.

3) If the From: field always contains an email address belonging to your domain (which is good), have you set up an SPF record in the DNS that allows your server to send emails on behalf of the said domain? Something like "v=spf1 a mx -all"

4) What does your email server (e.g. Postfix) think its hostname is? Does it match your IP address and reverse DNS entry?

Gmail will allow you to 'whitelist' a from email address.

James

You probably have solved the problem by now, but I found that reverse dns will make gmail move your email from the spam folder to the Inbox.

The reverse dns widget in the Network tab of the dashboard will do it. For good measure I changed my mx record to my fqdn and not mail.fqdn which doesn't really exist anyway.

However spf grading (see the headers of the received mail) will remain "neutral", presumably until you add an spf PTR record for your domain.