Improving Mailserver Reputation

It is quite easy to set up a mailing system on your own server, but more often than not the recipients of your mails find them in their spam or junk folder – if at all. The reason is that most mail providers establish procedures to block unsolicited mails we have to deal with nowadays.

There are a few measures one can take to improve the reputation of a mailserver so that outgoing mails are accepted from most providers. Almost surely it is not enough to implement some of them, instead all of them are required.

1.  Reverse DNS
   
   Ensure that reverse DNS lookups yields the right domain for the server IP.. Usually this can be set by the administrative interface of the webspace hoster (not the domain hoster): Connect the IP of the webspace your mailserver is running on to the domain from which the mails are sent from.

2. Hostname
   
   Ensure that the hostname command yields the right server name, e.g.,
   
     hostname example.org

3. SPF (Sender Policy Framework)
   
   Add a TXT record to the domain containing
   
     v=spf1 a mx ~all
   
   This usually can be done by the administrative interface of the domain hoster. It ensures that mails that claim to be sent from your domain must origin from an IP equal to the A or MX records of your domain.

4. DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail)
   
   This is dependent on the mail program you are using. We give an example here for exim4 running on a Debian system.
   
   Generate a private and public key in /etc/exim4/dkim/:
   
     openssl genrsa -out example.org-private.pem 2048
   
     openssl rsa -in example.org-private.pem -out example.org.pem -pubout -outform PEM
   
   Add a TXT record named <selector>._domainkey to the domain containing
   
       v=DKIM1;k=rsa;p=
   
   following the actual public key generated above. Choose some arbitrary string for <selector>; it must conform to the corresponding entry in /etc/exim4/exim4.conf.localmacros (see below). If the domain service refuses the record because of its length, separate it into chunks included in quotation marks.
   
   After that adapt /etc/exim4/exim4.conf.localmacros like so
   
     DKIM_CANON = relaxed
   
     DKIM_SELECTOR = 20190215
   
     DKIM_DOMAIN = example.org
   
     DKIM_PRIVATE_KEY = /etc/exim4/dkim/example.org-private.pem
   
   and run
   
     update-exim4.conf
   
     service exim4 restart