You may have success checking for common tracking and advertising elements in a mail. Good chance it's spam if there's not 100 trackers. Frustrating.
Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else
21–30 of 261 posts
Re: Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else
#22For me, as someone with their own mail server, these technologies mostly serve to inform me that Russian IP addresses are still trying to send email in the name of my domain for some stupid reason. It makes sense that people whose business is sending email know how to set up email correctly. I'm mostly surprised at how many legitimate sysadmins struggle with getting the basics correct. Surely those dozens of DMARC em…
In most organizations there is no point in a sysadmin to spend the effort in understanding how to set it up correctly as Marketing has got more authority on email. Marketing will simply demand changes to the config that they do not understand and there is nothing you can do to stop it as they will have the CEO on their side.
Re: Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else
#23Moved my mail over to Proton and they had a very nice process that made it easy to add the required DNS entries and verify that they were correct. I was dreading this step as I hadn't done it before but turned out to be a breeze thanks to that.
I think pretty much all email providers (and other systems that want to send on your behalf) have this. More or less the same process where they tell you what to add and then a "check my stuff" button to verify. Which is great.
Sounds good. As I said it was my first time, and I'd just glossed over the specs and did not look forward to it (I usually don't enjoy sysadmin work). So, was just pleasantly surprised.
Re: Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else
#24For me, as someone with their own mail server, these technologies mostly serve to inform me that Russian IP addresses are still trying to send email in the name of my domain for some stupid reason. It makes sense that people whose business is sending email know how to set up email correctly. I'm mostly surprised at how many legitimate sysadmins struggle with getting the basics correct. Surely those dozens of DMARC em…
In most organizations there is no point in a sysadmin to spend the effort in understanding how to set it up correctly as Marketing has got more authority on email. Marketing will simply demand changes to the config that they do not understand and there is nothing you can do to stop it as they will have the CEO on their side.
to be fair here: for a lot of companies, if the mass mailing stops, the money-flow stops then that's no good for anyone... so the CEO will probably err on the side of money, presumably.
Re: Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else
#25For me, as someone with their own mail server, these technologies mostly serve to inform me that Russian IP addresses are still trying to send email in the name of my domain for some stupid reason. It makes sense that people whose business is sending email know how to set up email correctly. I'm mostly surprised at how many legitimate sysadmins struggle with getting the basics correct. Surely those dozens of DMARC em…
In most organizations there is no point in a sysadmin to spend the effort in understanding how to set it up correctly as Marketing has got more authority on email. Marketing will simply demand changes to the config that they do not understand and there is nothing you can do to stop it as they will have the CEO on their side.
Marketing decides on DKIM and SPF ?
Re: Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else
#26Is there actually an "domain reputation as a service" provider, which controls a couple thousand gmail addresses, sends itself the emails and manually unmarks them as spam? Asking for a friend..........
Re: Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else
#27I am just having this problem. Actually getting SPF, DKIM and DMARC right and having a domain with a 0 spam score will still land you in the spam directory. It turns out, you need to have a "reputation"? before your email gets accepted into gmail. My head was spinning as to how that reputation will be built if your email just goes straight to spam. But sure, Linkedin emails are definitively not spam and their dark-pa…
I think the domain rep is worth less than IP rep. I had occasional issues sending issues when I self hosted on a VPS. When I moved my domain to Fastmail I haven’t ever had my emails go to spam.
Most home and VPS IP ranges have negative rep.
Re: Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else
#28Google are bad at SPF and DKIM.
—⁂—
1. I tried responding to a Chromium bug tracker message by email a couple of months ago, and it failed me:
> Unfortunately, your email to create/update an issue was not processed.
> Reason: SPF/DKIM check failed. Please ensure your domain supports SPF (https://support.google.com/a/answer/178723) and DKIM (https://support.google.com/a/answer/174124). If your domain does not support them, please use the Google Issue Tracker UI (https://issuetracker.google.com).
Trouble is, this is simply not true. My SPF and DKIM are fine. This makes me wonder whether the email ingestion system is simply broken for everyone.
—⁂—
2. I got involved in setting up a Google Workspace for someone a few months back, and the entire tool that their own documentation instructs you to use to check things, https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/checkmx/, has been laughably broken for years, sometimes not working at all, but mostly producing misleading nonsense results (e.g. claiming domains have no mail server set up when they do).
Then, to make it even more absurd, the feedback link they give you, https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/main/feedback?toolname=c..., iframes https://docs.google.com/a/google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdnlp8..., but you haven’t been allowed to iframe such documents for I don’t know how long so it doesn’t load, and even if it did, it’s a private form that only Googlers, I suppose, can fill in. And there have been plenty of reports about all of this for years, and it’s still broken.
Re: Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
In most organizations there is no point in a sysadmin to spend the effort in understanding how to set it up correctly as Marketing has got more authority on email. Marketing will simply demand changes to the config that they do not understand and there is nothing you can do to stop it as they will have the CEO on their side.
Marketing decides on DKIM and SPF ?
The problem I personally ran into as a one person IT department was that the VP of marketing had more power over me, as a manager, and that meant more to my supervisor (the CEO) than me fighting to do things as correctly as possible. I was seen as a roadblock or speed bump. So, they may not decide on DKIM and SPF, but if marketing isn’t happy then their negativity could cause push back that forces changes that may technically not be good for the company.
I’ve abandoned that role and have gone back to an IC role and I’m much happier for it.
Re: Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
In most organizations there is no point in a sysadmin to spend the effort in understanding how to set it up correctly as Marketing has got more authority on email. Marketing will simply demand changes to the config that they do not understand and there is nothing you can do to stop it as they will have the CEO on their side.
Marketing decides on DKIM and SPF ?
Indirectly, yes. Since they don't understand the details, management just "wants it to work". So too many email admins just give up and make their sending policies as permissive as they can to account for whatever new service marketing is using at the time.