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I've had a virtual private server for close to 6 months, and I'm going to start sending emails to users from noreply@mydomain.com. My handful of email tests so far have all resulted in a bounce because of "an unsual rate of unsolicited mail originating from your IP address." That's a strange reason because it suggests that my IP address has been sending a lot of emails, not just one or two, and I didn't even install postfix until I the start of these test emails.

I've probably sent 10 emails to my gmail address as a test, and here's the bounce message that gmail gives:

Our system has detected an unusual rate of 550-5.7.28 unsolicited mail originating from your IP address. To protect our 550-5.7.28 users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has been blocked. 550-5.7.28 Please visit 550-5.7.28 https://support.google.com/mail/?p=UnsolicitedIPError to review our 550 5.7.28 Bulk Email Senders Guidelines. g9si1490378qvq.7 - gsmtp (in reply to end of DATA command))

I've visited the link they provide above, which goes to a page entitled Prevent mail to Gmail users from being blocked or sent to spam, but it mostly talks about how to avoid messages being treated as spam, not how to get an IP address unblocked. What can I do to have gmail unblock my IP address?

TMI 1 Only my virtual private server is using this IP address, and my VPS has not been sending out emails in all the time I've had it (aoubt 6 months). I didn't even have postfix installed until a month ago, which is when I started testing emails to Gmail and getting bounces. (I didn't try again until today; it isn't as if I've been repeatedly sending bounce-worthy emails.) So I should think my IP address would have been unblocked by now if waiting patiently were the key.

TMI 2 I realize that I could pay to have an email service send my emails, but I'm just a solitary guy who's trying to serve users and not take on additional expenses.

Update

Thanks for the advice, which indeed proved to be the solution. For anyone reading this in the future, Google's message was misleading: even one email can count as 'an unusual rate of unsolicited mail'. Getting Gmail to accept my messages did not involve changing the rate or even include any wait time after making the suggested changes.

The suggested changes (some of which I had already implemented) included:

JellicleCat
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    One of your first steps should be to rule out obvious problems that would show up in an automated test like https://www.mail-tester.com/ – anx Jun 11 '21 at 02:38
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    You probably want to [edit] your question so it more clearly focuses on concern not already covered by our canonical question [How to send emails and avoid them being classified as spam?](https://serverfault.com/questions/48428/how-to-send-emails-and-avoid-them-being-classified-as-spam) – anx Jun 11 '21 at 02:42

2 Answers2

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Either find a mail provider that helps you achieve compliance with the common terms of such providers - or do work on implementing best practices.

I recommend you use one of the many (often free) third-party test services to confirm that your PTR,TLS,SPF,DKIM,DMARC,unsubscribe-headers,.. is working and additionally use the Google-provided postmaster tools to see the specifics for their servers.

it mostly talks about how to avoid messages being treated as spam, not how to get an IP address unblocked

Google points you to the same list of best practices because they really do expect senders to consider many if not most of them. They mean it when they say they will not just "unblock" you if you request so.

However.. non-spammers may get to effectively lift the block by making it easier for recipients to tell them apart from spammers. Remember that spam filtering at scale tends to be a lot more fine-grained than binary "you're blocked" and "free for all".

You might discover that as soon as FCRDNS & authentication is setup, your mail is no longer rejected blaming "your IP address" but instead evaluated using on a bigger/better aggregate of what Google knows about your ISP, your domain, your sending history and more.

Also, reconsider sender addresses like noreply. If a message is not appropriate to process replies for, it may well not be appropriate to fill peoples inboxes with either.

anx
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Can you provide information about what mail server you are using?

Anyhow:

Google does mention a few steps you can do to avoid landing in spam folder or being bounced.

Assuming the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of your mail server is vps.mydomain.com and the ip address of the server is 1.2.3.4:

  • Do you want to receive mails on that server? Then add a mx record pointing towards the mail server.

  • Do you have A record pointing to ip address of the server? Like vps.mydomain.com IN A 1.2.3.4.

  • Have you added the ip address of the mail server to your SPF record in DNS? Like added the text a:1.2.3.4 to the SPF record.

  • Do you sign outbound emails with DKIM? In that case add the public key to you DNS server like: keyname._domainkey.mydomain.com IN TXT ....

  • Have you created a DMARC entry to DNS? It tells recipient mail servers what todo if they receive mails from somebody pretending to be you.

These items are just the ones that I recall without looking at the configuration of my own mail server. :-)

Lasse Michael Mølgaard
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