is our dynamic IP causing our mail to go into spam, despite clean mailserver?

Recently, we are having contacts reporting our usual business email going into their spam folder. For sending email (with thunderbird), we connect to our email server (hosted by webland.ch) using a dynamic IP provided by our ISP. We have valid spf records (domain: holographicevolving.net).

Having checked all possible involved IP's for blacklists, our dynamic IP lists in the SORBS DUHL, which is normal for a ISP's dynamically assigned IP.

Our email server includes such dynamic IP (85.6.153.32) in the header's "From" field: is it possible that such appearance causes the email to go into spam, even if the message is sent through a mail server with a clean reputation? Is it normal practice to include such IP in the message which is being sent, or should I search for an ISP with different policies?

I'm including a full header of an email which has gone into spam (note: X-Brightmail: 1.00) - NOTE: the true email addresses have been replaced by fake addresses. In bold the dynamic IP:

Received-SPF: pass
To: abc@libero.it
From: X Y Z <xyz@holographicevolving.net>
Subject: test
Message-ID: <78417de1-a39d-593c-ac49-e2428bd0b20c@holographicevolving.net>
Disposition-Notification-To: X Y Z 
 <xyz@holographicevolving.net>
Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2017 11:46:59 +0200
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101
 Thunderbird/45.8.0
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
 boundary="------------5AC249F98CE20F74EA62454C"

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
--------------5AC249F98CE20F74EA62454C

1NN

Posted 2017-08-01T10:44:24.213

Reputation: 120

Answers

Usually only nearest external (untrusted) sender node checked for blacklist (looking at Your mail headers it probably ms11.webland.ch ([92.43.217.111]) )
May be other headers checked also
You can remove Received headers on Your mail server (ms11.webland.ch), so "Received: from [192.168.1.105] ([85.6.153.32])" become invisible to external hosts. How to do it depends on which mail server You using.

Mikhail Moskalev

Posted 2017-08-01T10:44:24.213

Reputation: 1 718

Thanks - I will contact my ISP to see if I can configure our mail server according to your point 3 – 1NN – 2017-08-01T17:25:52.670

1I mark this as correct answer regarding my question, as point Nr 1 is correct. The spam issue was effectively NOT related to the IP address, but to the fact that the ISP sent the emails through a domain different from the address in the FROM field, without providing any DKIM. – 1NN – 2019-10-28T19:52:25.963

This is actually a possibility. Many spam filtering systems now utilize DNS features to verify the identity of a mailer. If the email server's IP address is constantly changing this could be seen as a red-flag for a potential spammer... as legitimate email servers would typically use a hosted solution with a static IP. Doubly so as incoming mail depends on static MX entries in DNS that do not change.

Spammers, conversely, cannot usually use a hosted solution as the hosts disallow large scale emailing specifically because it gets their other, legitimate email marked as spam. Not having a static IP doesn't matter for spammers as they aren't expecting any incoming email.

If your mail server is hosted in such a way that it has a dynamic IP and you aren't an email spammer I would suggest getting inexpensive hosting or using inexpensive/free webmail like Google's G Suite. The latter lets you use gmail with your own domain name.

Cliff Armstrong

Posted 2017-08-01T10:44:24.213

Reputation: 1 813