SPF issue: what causes softfail?

Question

Whenever I use PHP to send emails to members of my site, the email ends up in the spam folder for most email providers like Gmail and Hotmail.

When I check the original source in Gmail, I see the following:

Delivered-To: [email protected]
Received: by 10.236.41.34 with SMTP id g22cs272510yhb;
Wed, 1 Jun 2011 05:38:27 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.236.77.102 with SMTP id c66mr7228248yhe.303.1306931907131; Wed, 01 Jun 2011 05:38:27 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: softfail (google.com: best guess record for domain of transitioning [email protected] does not designate as permitted sender)
Received: by 10.190.5.195 with POP3 id 3mf1156376yxt.72; Wed, 01 Jun 2011 05:38:27 -0700 (PDT) X-Gmail-Fetch-Info: [email protected] 14 mail.mywebserver.com 110 [email protected]
Return-path:
Envelope-to: [email protected]
Received: from mybestsh by s01.next-web.nl with local (Exim 4.69)
(envelope-from )
id 1QRkgT-0000BF-3v
for [email protected]; Wed, 01 Jun 2011 14:38:01 +0200
To: [email protected]
Subject: Your new password
MIME-Version: 1.0
From: MyServer
Reply-To: MyServer
X-Sender: MyServer

I have set up my SPF records as follows:

v=spf1 a mx ip4:xxx.xxx.xx.xx-all

I am wondering what causes the softfail. Any ideas?

Dingman

workaround.org/ispmail/lenny/spf may help. – Convector

Answer 1

The Return-Path header is empty. This means that during the SMTP conversation, the MAIL FROM command did not specify an email address where bounces are sent. It is the domain from this email address that SPF tests. If there is no email address, a softfail will result.

Covalence

Answer 2

Its gonna be difficult to answer this without the real info (involved IPs, domainname, sender adress, full spf record etc). It also looks like this message wasn't sent to gmail directly, but retrieved from your server via Gmail Fetch (Header X-Gmail-Fetch-Info ), which makes the analysis even more complicated.

here are a few possibilities:

• invalid SPF record (in your example there is no space between the IP and -all )
• wrong IP address in the SPF record
• your server doesn't send mails directly, mail is sent over a smarthost instead which is missing in the SPF record
• SPF isn't the problem (eg. your mail doesn't have a Date Header which can cause it to be flagged as spam as well, From/Reply-To/X.Sender are no real email addresses, ...)

Hayley

Answer 3

That means you are sending mail using email address which is not yours (e.g. your smtp server has domain name CompanyABC.COM while your're sending email whith sender: someone@CompanyDDD)

Grindstone

Answer 4

I found a very good post about spf check here. If you got your spf and other setting right and still getting email in spam folder wait for 3,4 hour as described in post

Google’s spam filters are very powerful. If you send too much spam to their server from an IP or IP block, they will block you for up to several hours at a time. You will receive spam, you will forward it. They will filter mail as spam that you don’t think is spam. No matter what, you will send email to Google that they think is spam, even if you disagree. By simply receiving more email than they appreciate in a given time frame, your forwarder will suddenly stop working for hours at a time (or worse).

Newlin