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I'm doing it, also using Qmail. I've felt the same pains as you (even started to suspect that providers might detect mail was being sent by Qmail and scoring th
by pflanze 10y ago
I'm doing it, also using Qmail. I've felt the same pains as you (even started to suspect that providers might detect mail was being sent by Qmail and scoring that lower (perhaps (only) spammers are using Qmail today?), but more probably my network block (Hetzner.de) is the biggest reason for my difficulties).
Here's what I've done on top of your list:
- backscatter prevention (using my own https://github.com/pflanze/better-qmail-remote https://github.com/pflanze/better-qmail-remote)
- do the Google domain verification dance (postmaster tools, configuring their entry in the DNS); still didn't prevent mails ending up in spam, but who knows whether it might still have helped.
- started running mailing lists on it anyway, in spite of me knowing that mails end up in people's spam folders, and simply tell all new subscribers that mails first end up in their spam folders and that once they mark them as non-spam the problem goes away. This seems to be working (people haven't complained), and will over time hopefully give my server the reputation I need.
(PS. I'm also still using DJBDNS, with a config generator written in Scheme, look out for tinydns-scm on my Github)
- jdmoreira 10y agoWhy would other MTAs have a buff against Qmail? I'm using maradns for DNS but I respect djb's software a lot. I'm using his publicfile as an httpd. I have already added my domains in google's postmaster tools. So far it hasn't helped much
- derefr 10y agoI think the parent's hypothesis was that MTAs would negatively weight any MTA that isn't the custom ones running on Gmail/Outlook/Yahoo servers.
- jdmoreira 10y agoThanks. Well... that's just terrible.
- calpaterson 10y agoOne thing I learned from my spam filter's logs is that sending email in a slightly weird way is great way to marked as spam. I used to receive a few thousand emails a month that didn't have a Date header - all spam - which is strictly required by RFC2822 but sometimes allowed to be absent. amavis-new easily and correctly detected them.
- pflanze 10y agoJust to prevent misunderstandings, I don't think my Qmail setup does anything "weird" at all. Just that if you consciously want to score according to the MTA used, that you can. The only weird thing about a Qmail installation adapted to today (backscatter protection, DKIM, standard Qmail patches) is that not many people are using it.
- pflanze 10y agoIt's not the MTAs that don't like Qmail, it would (my hypothesis) be the scoring systems run by the ISPs that would (hopefully automatically, i.e. based on statistics) give senders using some MTAs a lower score than others. Small users generally don't use Qmail anymore, so if you're a small sender and use Qmail, then perhaps that's odd, and iff spammers (perhaps for Qmail's efficiency (1)) are using Qmail often, then... (1) although you can attain higher efficiency with a custom MTA that's not safe, i.e. big spammers generally don't even retry for efficiency (that's why greylisting works). A friend of mine runs several mail servers on OpenBSD, using OpenSMTPD, and says he's got almost zero problems and scratches his head on what I'm doing. So there's 3 hypothetical reasons for that for me: - basically no spammers will be using OpenBSD (why should they?), - and hence also none be using OpenSMTPD, - and hence also none of them will be using a OpenBSD hoster (netblock!). Relatively many spammers (perhaps not the biggest ones, but still spammy senders) will be using services like Hetzner, and will most likely be running Linux. Now if Gmail etc. do check the MTA you're running, and perhaps do OS fingerprinting, they'll "know" how to judge you. Anyway, I don't have evidence that Qmail is a big reason, it seems likely the netblock is much more important (or at least that's what I'm inclined to think because the alternative would indeed be rather frustrating).