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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

The root cause is googles lame spam detection algorithm, I'm not in a position to debug it for them but clearly they're not doing their work properly if mail that is both clearly not spam and between parties that have previously had contact already gets marked as spam. It's super annoying because obviously I can't even monitor the other side, only by being persistent about follow up and/or lucky coincidences did we realise that gmail is the culprit.

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If you're talking about your domain mattheij.com on which you have your primary email address, I can tell that you have no SPF records set.

SPF records are REQUIRED to get past Gmail's spam filtering.

No, they're not, 80% or so of the messages does make it through... if it were consistent then that would be a lot better.

Some percentage of the people you contact likely have you in their address book or have recently contacted you. SPF isn't the only factor used.

Add the SPF record, damn.

80% of the mail sent to the same addresses... it's pretty much random as far as I can see as an outsider, I don't doubt there are triggers on google's end that decide one message is spam and another isn't but it's not deterministic enough to figure out what the real reason for the rejects is.

Not having SPF is a clear indication you have little idea of what you're doing with an email server.

A properly configured email server would have both SPF and DKIM signing.

Google's spam filter is a complicated black box. You're not going to get far understanding it by prodding it. But you're certainly not going to pass it by ignoring SPF.

Seems like basic debugging of complex systems to me. Yes, you may never by 100% sure that the lack of a SPF record is the root cause. But you do know that you don't have it, that some of your messages are getting spamfiltered, and it's well-known that Gmail uses it for spam detection. So just add it already. The worst that could happen is that you wasted a few minutes on something that doesn't fix the problem. How much time have you spent messing with this already?

I don't know what your history is, but there's piles of bugs that I've had to fix by just trying random things that seem vaguely related to see what happens. If I refused to try anything until I was 100% sure of the root cause, then lots of bugs I've been assigned would never have been fixed, and many more would have taken 10x longer.

Much spam filtering uses Bayes' theorem and it has been this way for a very long time. Your lack of SPF records must massively increase the chance that your emails are spam.

If you are still getting some emails through, they must have other characteristics that make them look less like spam than the others that are getting filtered.

Just add the SPF.

Yes, that will definitely happen. But since my mail server is not administered directly by me I had to arrive at this point as a user of email and not as the administrator of the server.

This issue surely does not affect me alone hence the warning, the sender may have no idea their messages get dropped at all.

Your email server may not be administered by you, but I'd bet you control your domain name.

SPF is a DNS record on that domain name. You control that record, not your email provider.

Set that and watch this problem disappear.

This was what i first checked too. At some day i started to receive more and more Mail Delivery Failure messages in my Inbox from addresses that seemed to be random or of some Chinese names. I just saw them because a catch all address was configured. Some MTA showed the messages and it was obviously some Chinese spam. After configuring SPF records this stopped immediately. So this might can be the reason why google thinks you are sending spam. Even if not, you will better your rating with them configured.

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