Some Emails Not Being Received

[Carbo]

This one has me scratching my head. For the past month or so I have noticed that emails sent to me from any Yahoo! account aren't being received. I can send emails to Yahoo! accounts, but folks trying to contact me from there aren't getting through. Nor are the emails being bounced back to the sender, leaving them to believe I received their correspondence. Needless to say, this is creating confusion and, in a few cases, some angry folks who think I am ignoring them. Just where are these emails going? More importantly, how do I get to the bottom of this issue?

Using OE6 as my email client. Comcast is my ISP. I can receive emails with my personal email, ****@comcast.net. But my website based email accounts aren't receiving any Yahoo! sent messages. As I mentioned, I'm not receiving any error message, and the recipient isn't finding any bounced back emails on their end. I am now recommending they CC the email to my backup Gmail account, and I am receiving those emails just fine.

Breaking news! I just sent a variety of emails from a Yahoo! account I have. Again, the ones addressed to my Comcast email were received. But the emails sent to my website based email accounts didn't get through. Then, when I went back to my Yahoo! account I found this message:
Hi. This is the qmail-send program at yahoo.com.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following
addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

:
83.170.64.234 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: 550 relay not permitted
Giving up on 83.170.64.234.
Does any of this make sense to anyone? Yahoo! "does not like recipient"?! Huh?! :eek: What'd I ever do to them?
Thank you.

[edmicman]

Did you ever resolve this? I think the same thing is happening to me. I don't know when it started, but I had a friend say he emailed me but I never received it. I jumped over to my old yahoo address and tried sending myself some test messages.

I have a number of hostpc hosted email addresses set up just as forwarders to my gmail account, and I use my gmail account as my main email. Messages sent from Yahoo directly to my gmail account get through, but I still haven't received any of the messages sent to my hostpc forwarders. I, too, don't get any sort of feedback at Yahoo as to the message failing or anything. So I assume that it went through when it didn't.

To make things even stranger, I *did* receive a message from a friend on Yahoo emailing from Oregon. But myself, and my friend who didn't get through, we're both emailing from the Michigan areas. I don't know why that would make a difference, but they do come from different yahoo servers. :shrug?: I'm on www81 here if that matters....I don't know what to do or what's going on....

[tonydi]

edmicman...

It sounds like you have a different issue, since you aren't getting the bounce notices that Carbo gets.

I suspect that your Yahoo mail is getting marked as spam because the rbl lists rountinely block whole segments of Yahoo server addresses. If the email addresses here are just forwarders, I'm going to guess that there's no spam folder for these to go into and they must get deleted, or at least not forwarded to Gmail.

If this is the case, then unfortunately I think the only thing you can do is to whitelist all of yahoo in SpamAssassin with a *@yahoo.com entry. Maybe the Gmail servers will help cut down on the real spam that gets through.

[edmicman]

Your assessment echoes what the helpdesk thought, too, and what I've seem to have found out on my own. I don't want to whitelist the entire yahoo domain, as I'm the only one using forwarders, and I have a number of friends that I host email for that wouldn't be too happy to start having all that spam get through. I guess whitelisting the specific email addresses is the way I'm going to have to go.....

[Sean]

How can I put this in plain terms?...hmm..


YAHOO MAIL SUCKS 100%

:love

[edmicman]

On a related note...is it possible for SpamAssassin to *not* scan and affect emails sent to a forwarder address? I've got a forwarder set to send my domain email to my gmail account, and if SA flags something as spam, it just drops it (because SA sends it to a SPAM folder, except there is no SPAM folder because it's just a forwarder). It just seems like it shouldn't do that or something, and I can't necessarily whitelist something if I don't know it's being flagged even. Just my $.02.

[mharvey]

I verified that any email that is sent to a forwarder address that is determined to be spam by SpamAssassin will be dropped if you have SA configured to send spam to the users Spam folder. The email may be put somewhere... I just have not found it.

There are two ways that you can prevent this from happening. The first would be to change SA to leave the Spam in the Inbox. I have not actually tried this but I think it would work.

The other way would be to add a whitelist_to entry in your SA config file. This will prevent any email sent to this address from being marked as spam. I do not think you can do this from the SA control panel in Direct Admin. You will have to select the "Manually edit the config file yourself" link at the bottom of the screen and add the whitelist_to like yourself.

Fo more info you can go here (http://spamassassin.apache.org/full/3.1.x/doc/Mail_SpamAssassin_Conf.html) and search for the whitelist_to option.

[mharvey]

There is another option that you can use to prevent mail to a forwarder marked as spam by SA from disappearing.

If you change the SA option to "Redirect it to the catch-all ~/.spamassassin/spam folder" then all email marked as SPAM will be delivered to the Spam folder of the default (catch-all) email address for your domain. This may or may not be better than the whitelist_to option.

[edmicman]

Thank you for the ideas! I'm going to try the whitelist_to option...I think that sounds like it will work the best.

My problem stems from that I am hosting email for about a dozen of my friends. They all have email accounts, but my own hosted emails I've set up as forwards only to my gmail account. The people who have regular IMAP accounts would want to know if they had anything marked as spam in case they missed it. I'm already having to go and whitelist anything they let me know gets flagged wrong; there's NO WAY for them to individually tailor SpamAssassin to their own account - everything applies across my wholew domain. So when someone notices something getting flagged as spam that shouldn't be, they have to tell me the address so I can whitelist it.

That sort of works for them, but like you said, things marked as spam that were going to my forwards were just being dropped or something....they essentially were disappearing!

It doesn't help matters that it seems either on the new hostpc server I'm on or just recently Yahoo's made bad blood with some blacklists, but it's pretty much guaranteed that anything that comes into any address on my domain that comes from an @yahoo address is going to be marked as spam. What's up with that?? Shouldn't it apply some other tests first, too? Is there a way to see WHY it's marking the yahoo addresses as spam?? Thanks again, and I'll see how it goes.

[mharvey]

I am glad that helps.

As far as the Yahoo emails being flagged as Spam... Much of the email that originates from yahoo (either email accounts @yahoo.com or posts from yahoogroups) end up passing though servers that are on one or more blacklists. This can cause all yahoo email to be marked as spam by SpamAssassin.

You can control this to some degree by adjusting the scores that are given to each test that SA applies to your email. If you have your SA threshold set to a low value and an email appears on one or more blacklists it likely that email will be marked as spam.

You can always see why an email was marked as spam (or why it was not) by looking at the headers of the email. SA will add a header "X-Spam-Status" that lists the tests that registered hits on that email. Here is an example from a Spam that I received:

X-Spam-Status:Yes, score=10.4 required=8.0 tests=AWL=0.167, DNS_FROM_RFC_ABUSE=4,DNS_FROM_RFC_POST=4,DNS_FROM_ RFC_WHOIS=2, FROM_HAS_ULINE_NUMS=0.217

This is from an email that I sent to myself from my own yahoo.com account. You will see that the email was marked as Spam as it had a score of 10.4 (which is above my threshold of 8.0). This main contributors to this score were the DNS_FROM_RFC_* tests. You can see a lists of all the tests with a short description of them here (http://spamassassin.apache.org/tests_3_1_x.html). In this case the same email caused hits due to lists maintained by rfc-ignorant.org. It does not matter what the other tests say, if the score from these tests exceeds the required score then the email will be marked as spam. Unless another test (like whitelists) are also hit which subtract from the score.

My solution was to lower the scores for the individual blacklist tests. If the email is passes through a blacklisted server but does not get any points from other tests then it does not meet the SA threshold I have set. I still get some spam email that slips through (if it gets one blacklist hit but no other tests contribute to the score) but I prefer to have some spam slip through rather than lose legitimate email to a spam filter.

[edmicman]

Interesting, that's very helpful! I had a basic idea how SA works, but can't say I'm that familiar with it, but your description helps a lot. Your solution sounds like it would be a good idea, too. I actually ran into "rfc-ignorant.org" a little while back - my wife's grandparents' email was marked as spam, but came from a small ISP in New Mexico. It turns out their ISP was on that blacklist.

What is the default scores for DNS_FROM_RFC_*, or what should I set them to be if I basically want to as you say disable being marked as spam anything that's on a blacklist unless it also fails some other test, too?

Thanks for all the help!!

[mharvey]

The default scores for all of the tests can be found here (http://spamassassin.apache.org/tests_3_1_x.html).

The scores that are being uses on your server may be quite a bit higher. I know that the default settings were adjusted in the config file on the servers at HostPC a while ago to cut down on the spam. You can see the score that is being used in the header each time a test is positive.

You can then adjust the scores by manually editing your SpamAssassin config file. To do this go to the SA screen in DirectAdmin. Scroll all the way to the bottom and there will be a link that says "Manually edit the config file yourself". This will open up a text edit window that allows you to edit the user_prefs file and change the scores for individual tests yourself.

Keep in mind that if you change the SA config using the normal DirectAdmin screen it will throw out all of your manual edits.

The lists of available tests are here (http://spamassassin.apache.org/tests_3_1_x.html).

A decription of the options that you can put in user_prefs is here (http://spamassassin.apache.org/full/3.1.x/doc/Mail_SpamAssassin_Conf.html#user_preferences).