Emails from CiviCRM completely rejected by GMX (Germany)

Question

everyone,

I have sent a newsletter to the admin team for testing purposes. All admins with GMX email accounts did not receive this email. The email was also not found in the spam folder or trash. With a newsletter to all contacts this would probably never have been noticed.

The same email sent directly from the sender address arrived. I suspect that the header entries from CiviCRM (bounce, precedence: bulk) are causing this. Does anyone have similar experiences and maybe even a solution? GMX is an often used email provider in Germany.

Best regards

Marion

Answer 1

The same email sent directly from the sender address arrived.

Based on the above piece of information, there are two lines of investigation that are worth pursing.

One key difference between sending a message via CiviMail vs sending directly (i.e. from your mail program) is the "sender envelope from address", which is not the same thing as the "From:" address in the message itself. A CiviMail message uses a sender envelope from address using the domain in the mail account used for bounce processing.

i.e. look at [yourdomain]/civicrm/admin/mailSettings?reset=1 and look at the row that says "Used for bounce processing". All emails sent using CiviMail will use that domain in the sender envelope from address.

So, your first line of inquiry is to look at the SPF record of that domain and make sure that the machine that sends out the email has an entry in some form, i.e. that your smtp server ip is blessed to send out mail from that domain.

If that has already been done properly, then the second line of inquiry is to look at the IP of your outgoing mail machine and look at it's reputation. It's possible that GMX is using a blacklist to block email from your mail machine's ip.

If both of those seem like issues that are too technical, then you really will need someone who understands them to sort it out, otherwise you won't be getting much value from CiviMail.

Answer 2

I recommend using "mail-tester" to establish whether or not you are on a mailing black list.

Another thing is that if you are sending to a lot of incorrect email addresses then many service providers will just stop all your requests entirely. Why not try the Email Amender CiviCRM extension to clean your email addresses both in bulk, and as they are added to your CRM?

Answer 3

We have the same problem with GMX. We had already contact with them and they say, that they have some policy that blocks our CiviCRM mails. But they have also a policy not say, what kind of policy it is, that blocks our mails. :( For years now it is like this, that they set our server on a internal whitelist. And then our emails are accepted. After some time we are blocked again. Then we contact them and they set us on their whitelist. Then our emails are accepted. After some time we are blocked again. Then we contact them and they set us on their whitelist. And so on...