A few months ago, someone had used an exploit in my system to send out a lot of spam mail, so I was blacklisted by most companies. I've worked hard to get my server off all the blacklists and thus far I am completely clear now; however, with some email providers, my email goes through, but then is moved instantly to the spam/junk folder. Is there anyway to prevent this? After doing some research it seems encrypting the mails before they are sent out should solve this issue, but was just wondering if anyone has experience with this and if so, how do I encrypt the mails?
Encrypting the mail will do jack all for you because it will only encrypt (mostly) the body of the message. The headers with your IP address will still be clearly visible, and these will map back - via dns - to you and your domain.
Ending up not making it into the inbox, and landing in the junk can be caused by many, many issues - but it's out of scope for this forum and quite specialist. Making sure all the essentials are in play such as clear on ALL blacklists (including the internal ones run by anti-spam companies), proper DNS, SPF, DKIM etc, along with properly formed MIME content that does not contain spammy phrases is the starting base. Hope that helps.
Encrypting the mail will do jack all for you because it will only encrypt (mostly) the body of the message. The headers with your IP address will still be clearly visible, and these will map back - via dns - to you and your domain.
Ending up not making it into the inbox, and landing in the junk can be caused by many, many issues - but it's out of scope for this forum and quite specialist. Making sure all the essentials are in play such as clear on ALL blacklists (including the internal ones run by anti-spam companies), proper DNS, SPF, DKIM etc, along with properly formed MIME content that does not contain spammy phrases is the starting base. Hope that helps.
Thanks leslie, I've done the best I can getting off all the blacklists I could possibly find, and I'm not sure if you would know this, but I even tried changing the IP address for a domain on the server but it still goes to junk mail, before this incident it went to regular mail perfectly fine.
Once you do reputational damage because of spamming, it can be almost impossible to 'clear your name' so you end up in inboxes - and there are a number of reasons for this but ethically it would be wrong to cover them in great depth because they are there for a reason.
What I can say is that I've spent a great portion of my life working with email systems and anti-spam, and I can tell you that changing IP won't really help with the more sophisticated enterprise anti-spam systems if you mention your domain, or link to it anywhere in your mail - even down to the sever name, helo and return path. Not only do they key on domain names, they also key on authoritative name server IP's so if you swing the IP, the name server is still blacklisted anyway.
Anti-spam is a deep and wide subject which only a few people really properly understand - and it's certainly out of context for the Apache section in a coding forum I'm afraid, because sharing key information on evading it helps the bad guys.
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