CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Here is my setup:

• CiviCRM 3.1.1 & Drupal 6.9 with PHP 5.2.10 & MySQL 5.1.37 running on a VPS that I have full control over
• CiviMail configured (and working correctly) with CiviSMTP
• (Also) staff personal email accounts hosted with gmail through Google Apps

For your information, we have pushed (for the next version of civicrm) an improved CRM/Mailing/BAO/Mailing.php
http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-5957 that adds a Precedence:bulk header that should help being less identified as a spam. If you feel comfortable backporting, might be worthwhile (that's a simple change)

If I'm correct, it means that you are using the smtp servers provided by CiviSMTP to send the emails, right ?

I have sent a test mailing to several test email addresses that I set up with Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and AOL, and a couple of shared hosting servers. All went well except that my message ended up in the Yahoo test user's spam folder.

yahoo tend to be quite a pain indeed. Finding why it got caught is a bit of black magic, it might simply be because too many mails sent via civismtp have been marked by yahoo as spam.

Are you overriding the VERP ? In my experience, works better (and if you don't want to automatically handle the  "human" replies from within civicrm, then override as it has no impact on the bounce).

From the research I've done, it seems like I should set up some sort of sender authentication. What is the best way to proceed?

• SPF seems easy to set up, so I'm planning to do that using this guide: http://www.kai-mai.com/node/154 Does anyone have any further advice?

Worthwhile, you have to include both the ones from gmail and the servers from civismtp (and any other mail server you might use to send emails). Ask them about what is the right configuration.

• DomainKeys and DKIM seem slightly different than SPF, and it seems like I should to to implement DomainKeys and/or DKIM in addition to SPF. However DomainKeys and DKIM seem similar to each other and I've read some guides that recommend to only set up one of them. Does that make sense? Which one should I try to set up? Both of these authentication schemes seem to require that the email headers be modified for each message that is sent, which makes me think that the CiviMail application would need to be made aware of this authentication scheme and properly configured to use it. Is that really the case? If so, then is it even possible for me to set up DomainKeys and/or DKIM with my current set up?

if you are using the smtp server from civismtp, that's not something you can change, that's on their side.

Otherwise, no big differences between the two if I recall properly

FYI, I'm using DKIM, mostly because there is a package on debian that interfaces easily with postfix. You don't have to change anything on civicrm, that's something postfix (trying to send the messages from civicrm) does and add the right headers (DKIM-Signature) directly.

Good luck

X+