If you're self-hosting your services and having trouble getting your emails through Gmail and infuriated by Google's non-existent support, you're not the only one. I'd like to share my experiences trying to get it sorted out.
I'm the author of the post above. You can tell how arrogant Google employees are from all the previous posts he made in the past.
- https://support.google.com/mail/thread/4857692/how-to-delist-my-ip-address-from-gmail-blacklist?hl=en
- https://support.google.com/mail/thread/3745648?hl=en
Seriously, fuck these guys.
Don't embarrase yourself by setting up your servers wrong. Make sure that emails have valid DKIM signatures, mail contents are good, rDNS is properly set, MTAs use TLS 1.3 with valid certificates, and there's no error in TXT records. You have to get those all "PASS" marks and the padlock icon next to the email address. This is the very basic. Make sure your servers are complaint before sending anything. And whenever you change the settings, TEST IT or your IP address can be listed because of broken configuration.
Here are the tools I use to diagnose.
- https://www.checktls.com/TestReceiver (most favourable for TLS diagnosis)
- https://www.mail-tester.com/
- https://mxtoolbox.com/deliverability
If you're sure you've got everything right and all the other providers respect the mails from your server, it's most likely Google's internal rep list.
Contrary to that guy's claim, it is evident that Google does keep an internal IP reputation list. If the IPv4 address you have been assigned is dirty, all the email from your server could be marked as spam. Forever. Doesn't matter if you've delisted your IP from all known blacklists. Not only Google but also all the other major email service providers do not account for the fact that IP addresses get passed around and the blacklist entries must expire. Google DOES NOT CARE. It's our job to ensure that we get clean IP addresses.
There are plenty of posts on the internet on how to check if your IP address is dirty, but here are the ones I use.
- https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
- https://dnschecker.org/ip-blacklist-checker.php
- https://whatismyipaddress.com/blacklist-check
- https://cleantalk.org/blacklists
So basically all the tools that show up on the search result.
It could be safer to just use an IPv6 address for sending emails as the IPv6 address range is wide and the use of IPv6 addresses is not yet widely spread, hence the less chance of getting a dirty address. But there are still MTA's with only IPv4 addresses. But at least most of Google's servers use IPv6, so this could be the solution for you. See the next section if you're using AWS.
However, if your cloud service provider or your ISP would not support rDNS for IPv6 , make sure your server does not send any emails using the IPv6 connection. This can be done in many ways.
- Don't assign your machine an IPv6 address at all
- Disable the setting. For example,
- Postfix:
smtp_address_preferenceorinet_interfacesaltogether
- Postfix:
There shouldn't be any problem receiving mails via IPv6 connections. But if you're paranoid, you can disable IPv6 SMTP connectivity on your daemon or firewall.
AWS will set up a rDNS record for your IPv6 address on request! Which is pretty cool.
However, sometimes your ticket will be assigned to a grumpy representative who thinks that they're doing their job right. If your ticket is responded by something like "do you know what you're doing, mate?", do not attempt to reason with the rep. Instead, toss the ticket in the bin and retry your luck in 2 weeks time. Hopefully, your ticket will be assigned to someone generous. It took me 3 attempts. It's probably because they have to put up with Telstra. It could depend on how strict the ISPs are in the part of the world you're in.
This is the link to the tickets I'm talking about:
There's this awesome tool made by awesome people that lists all the emails received by their test accounts. You can use the tool before sending your emails to real people's Gmail accounts.
There I said it.
You appear to have missed the fact that the person you're complaining about in https://support.google.com/mail/thread/171517615?hl=en&msgid=172576102 is not a Google employee but is a volunteer on their forums.