Activation emails dropped as spam due to bad received header.

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Floyd
Registered User
Posts: 187
Joined: Tue Sep 03, 2013 10:16 am

Activation emails dropped as spam due to bad received header.

Post by Floyd »

Greetings. Our site is using 3.0.9. All outgoing emails, e.g., PM alerts, password change confirmations and new member activation emails, have a Received header of server1.myforum.com instead of just myforum.com. The server1.myforum.com does not have a DNS registration so most email servers are simply dropping the emails as spam and they're not even winding up in member's spam folders. We fixed this about a year ago by registering server1.myforum.com. However, the IP address for the site has changed so the registration and the reverse DNS lookup that email servers are doing are no longer valid.

Here are some sample Received headers.

A received header from a recent PM alert email which doesn't work.
  • Received: from server1.thisisms.com (unknown [23.252.116.61])
    by gum-mx.seanet.com (gum-mx.seanet.com) with ESMTP id 09BFAE2AE8E
    for <[email protected]>; Wed, 21 Dec 2016 22:34:32 -0800 (PST)
A Received header from an old activation email which did work.
  • Received: from server1.thisisms.com ([107.190.133.149]) by mx-ha.gmx.net
    (mxgmx111) with ESMTPS (Nemesis) id 0LxcTH-1afyQa1Y1z-017Gk9
This has been a problem again for about the last four months where new members are not receiving the account activation emails.

Is there a solution for this problem?

How do we change the mail system so that the DNS registration for server1.thisisms.com remains active even in the event of an IP address change?

Note that 107.190.133.149 still produces a correct reverse DNS lookup yielding server1.thisisms.com, but that IP address is no longer in use.

Thanks.
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Floyd
Registered User
Posts: 187
Joined: Tue Sep 03, 2013 10:16 am

Re: Activation emails dropped as spam due to bad received header.

Post by Floyd »

Perhaps, there's a way to modify 3.0.9's mail configuration so that it's using thisisms.com instead of server1.thisisms.com in the outgoing email's received headers? If that were possible, then we would only need to worry about the one DNS registration.

Thanks.
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stevemaury
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Joined: Thu Nov 02, 2006 12:21 am
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Name: Steve
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Re: Activation emails dropped as spam due to bad received header.

Post by stevemaury »

May I note that this is in no way a phpBB issue? However, you can try setting Use SMTP to No and let php sendmail try doing the job.
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Floyd
Registered User
Posts: 187
Joined: Tue Sep 03, 2013 10:16 am

Re: Activation emails dropped as spam due to bad received header.

Post by Floyd »

stevemaury wrote:May I note that this is in no way a phpBB issue? However, you can try setting Use SMTP to No and let php sendmail try doing the job.
Thank you for the suggestion. We will look into it.
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