How do I stop my emails from going into recipients junk folder. I happens wether I use outlook or send it online through horde. Let's say my domain is www.mydomain.com. My pop3 is set at mail.mydomain.com and the smtp set as mail.mydomain.com, and the authentication thing is on. Someone told me I should use my isp providers (verizon) info for my outgoing mail server instead of mail.mydomain.com. What do you guys think?

it's probably best to use the smtp server that matches your domain name.

Using your ISP's can get you into trouble by making you look like a spoofer to some filter.

(check the phishing emails you get in life from say "citibank"- many of them come from a comcast smtp server for example- so spam filters look for such stuff.)

You should also see if your domain has an SPF record and make sure it properly is set up.

sent an email to:
check-auth@verifier.port25.com

it will reply if your email is passing spf and domain key tests. If it says you have an spf failure then that is set up incorrectly.

Also there's somethign about reverse dns lookups that need to be right. Sorry that I dont know about. Generally I think hostmysite handles that but i recently saw something about people with server plans might need to put in a support ticket to handle that correctly- can someone else explain?

There are quite a few reasons that can cause your messages going into the recipients junk mail folders. Just as we have settings in SmarterMail that you can control to block spam, others may have similar. Other ISP's do vigorous inbound filtering and add a lot of rules to check the messages for. An SPF record usually helps a recipient know if the email was sent from a server that it should be sent from, some ISP's require them. If you are in our shared network we already have rDNS setup for all of our outbound gateways. Basically an the receiving server sees the sending servers IP address. It checks the sending servers IP address for a PTR record. That PTR record will contain a FQDN (fully qualified domain name), something like domain.com or smtp.domain.com etc. It will then check the FQDN's A record and see if it matches the IP that is connecting. If it doesn't match a lot of major ISP's will not accept the message, or give it a score that may put it into the recipients junk mail folder. Hope this helps.

-Ray

still can't get this straitened out. does anyone one have some suggestions.

My emails are getting through gmail, yahoo, aol but not hotmail and smaller ones for some reason.

What program are you using to send this? If you are using sendmail, I know a few handy tricks.

What ever the tolken program is that comes with a vps hosting account. I guess it is sendmail. Any help would be much appreciated.

Sorry for the delayed response.

I'm sorry; I misread your first post. I had thought that you would sending email from your web application. However, as you don't have much control of Horde, your best option would be to add an SPF record. Personally, I switched to Google Apps for your Domain when I had a similar problem (but not with horde). If you are willing to change some mx records, you can get this setup in 15 minutes, and you will most likely not see this occur again. Google is pretty good about ensuring that no emails get flagged as spam. The one disadvantage of this is that if you want to write code to send mail from Google's SMTP servers, you will have to use SSL.

If you go to http://whatismyip.com you can take your IP address and put that into the form located here, http://www.robtex.com/rbl.html

If you see any red entries it means your IP has been marked as a spammer by a real time black list. At this point you would need to run Anti-Virus and Spyware/Malware tools to ensure that your home computer is not acting as an open relay because of a compromise. Then you would need to contact the operators of the RBL to have yourself removed.

If your IP is not on any blacklists then we would need to investigate the issue further.

If its just hotmail filtering your messages you can contact them here:

https://support.msn.com/eform.aspx?productKey=edfsmsbl&ct=eformts

They mainly ask about mailing lists. If you dont have a mailing list simply tell them that.

If you need help with filling that out let me know, I've dealt with similar issues a few times with hotmail and was able to get them resolved it just took a few days.