What must one do to avoid Gmail's retarded non-spam filtering?

Wed Sep 29 18:48:03 UTC 2010

Thanks John. This was a common question that was asked off-list. That edge MTA is not used and has never been used by anything/anyone other than us. No customer mail flows or has flowed in or out via it ever.

As I mentioned in my follow-up post, the issue at this point is that the domain has been blacklisted. I can send an identical message from the same MTA, changing only the From header, and it will be delivered to Inbox. Only when the From header contains @caneris.com will the message be delivered to spam. Any changes to the MTA IP, content, headers, etc. don't have any effect. 

Erik

----- Original Message -----
From: "John Levine" <johnl at iecc.com>
To: nanog at nanog.org
Cc: "erik list" <erik_list at caneris.com>
Sent: Wednesday, September 29, 2010 1:58:28 PM
Subject: Re: What must one do to avoid Gmail's retarded non-spam filtering?

>We have proper A+PTR records on the edge MTAs, proper SPF records for
>the originating domain, proper Return-Path and other headers, and so
>on. There isn't anything that I can think of other than the content
>itself which would be abnormal, and obviously the content is
>repetitive and can't be changed much. Is there something obvious
>which we've missed?

What else goes out from that MTA? User forwarded mail? Mailing lists?
random customer junk?

It is a really good idea to separate your mail streams. These days it
means separate IPs for users, transactions, forwards, and such,
eventually different DKIM signatures will do the trick.

R's,
John