Prevent your mail/IP from getting marked as SPAM/Blacklisted, A few TIPS!

“SPAM“! A word familiar to all Netizens.

Emails plays a major role in today’s business, one must be keen to preserve the authenticity of mails they sent to the users and fail to do so may result in getting your mail server IP blacklisted and mails ends-up in users junk folder and they die!

This post is not a perfect guide to prevent you from getting blacklisted by the spamcops, but a few tips that could save your “Time” and “Reputation”.

1) All email is filtered against published blacklists of spam servers. Check whether your mailserver IP is already blacklisted : http://www.mxtoolbox.com/. If listed, take necessary actions to remove it. You can temporarily switch the mail server IP to get the mails moving until your regular IP is released.

2) All mails will be filtered based on certain rules. It looks for senders email address, mail subject line and words on the message content. Avoid using blank subject line and using common spammers words like “offer, discount, sale, free etc… There are a lot more..

3) Maintain a regular time intervals while sending mails to a particular sender. This could be setup on exim configuration file. (Needs admin privileges)

4) Enable SPF:
Sender Policy Framework (SPF), is an e-mail validation system designed to prevent e-mail spam by addressing a common vulnerability, source address spoofing. SPF allows administrators to specify which hosts are allowed to send e-mail from a given domain by creating a specific DNS SPF record in the public DNS for that domain. Mail exchangers then use the DNS to check that mail from a given domain is being sent by a host sanctioned by that domain’s administrators.

If SPF record is enabled for a domain, spammers and phishers are less likely to forge e-mails pretending to be from that domain. Spam filters now check for SPF records and hence eliminate the chance of forged mails, spams. Hence an SPF protected domain is less attractive to spammers and phishers and is less likely to be blacklisted by spam filters and ligitimate mails will go through.

SPF keeps the detail of the machine which is only authorized to send mails for that particular domain. This is done by adding additional a TXT record to their existing DNS records. Mail receivers that checks for SPF records check the domain DNS and finds whether the server is allowed to send mails for that domain.

(Read the rest of this entry…)

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cPanel or Lxadmin – Roundcube issues – SERVICE CURRENTLY NOT AVAILABLE! Error No. [0x01F4]

SERVICE CURRENTLY NOT AVAILABLE!

Error No. [0x01F4]

That is what you will see on logging to the Roundcube. How to fix it ?

on cPanel, just update roundcube

/usr/local/cpanel/bin/update-roundcube --force

On Lxadmin, just re-install

rm /var/cache/lxadmin/lxwebmail*
lphp.exe ../bin/misc/installRoundCube.php
/script/upcp

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Horde errors – Fatal error: Cannot use string offset as an array in /usr/local/cpanel/base/horde/lib/Horde/Block/Layout/Manager.php on line 389

A bug reported in Horde http://bugs.horde.org/ticket/?id=4070 decided to hit one of our customer’s client accounts. Customer had old cPanel version and don’t want to upgrade due to internal reasons. Client said, he was exploring the Horde’s vast options (Horde is a web Outlook – can’t complain ) and while messing up with the Layout options in Horde he hit the bug,

Fatal error: Cannot use string offset as an array in /usr/local/cpanel/base/horde/lib/Horde/Block/Layout/Manager.php on line 389

Not sure what caused the issue and it is not happening with IE, and only in FF. However a simple layout reset fixed the issue. Good Luck. Still, we need to find the real cause.

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When trying to log in to Plesk horde, the login page reloads and does not log in into webmail.

Operating System was Linux

No one was able to login to Plesk’s default webmail, horde. Enabled error reporting in php.ini and got the error message as below in the “/etc/httpd/logs/error_log” and/or “/var/log/psa-horde/psa-horde.log”

PHP Warning: Unknown(): Failed to write session data (files). Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct (/usr/local/psa/admin/sessions) in Unknown on line 0, referer: http://webmail.supportsages.com/test.php?mode=unregister

Here the solution was to edit the php.ini to use /tmp as the session.save_path or even “/var/lib/php/session”

Other solution, for similar issue (not this exact error though) is to set,

session.auto_start = 0 in php.ini
Making sure that localhost entry is in /etc/hosts and resolves. For that do a telnet localhost 143 and if you get “Connected to” message, its not that issue check /etc/hosts file. It must have permissions -rw-r–r– (644) on a ls -l
Whatever be the session.save_path setting in the php.ini, it should have the permission of 1777
Run IMP test to check the problem at: http://webmail.DOMAIN.COM/horde/imp/test.php and make sure that you get the green words for all the tests.
This problem may occur if the domain’s web content is hosted on another server and the MX DNS record doesn’t exist or points not to the Plesk server. IMP tries to check mail on whatever server the domain name resolves to. In order to prevent this from happening the domain name or MX record (if it exists) must be resolved locally to the server.

References : http://kb.parallels.com/article_41_260_en.html

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