I installed VestaCP on one of my droplets, and registered a test domain on Freenom to see if DNS and mail worked. Well, they do, but Gmail sends them straight to spam, and other email providers don’t… The IP is all good and not on any blacklists, and I have DKIM, DMARC, and SPF all set up. I set Exim to listen on the hostname smtp.mydomain.com with an LE cert, Dovecot imap.mydomain.com, also an LE cert, and my droplet hostname as hosting.mydomain.com with a PTR record for the same. Is there anything I’m missing?
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It really does sound like you have your bases covered. How long after you created your DNS records did you test things. I am wondering if it’s possible that the SPF hadn’t propagated.
While our team works to maintain a clean IP pool it is also possible that a previous droplet assigned that IP got itself blacklisted somewhere. You can check your IP status on various lists here.
The fact that these messages are not flagged as spam by other providers makes me think that Google is flagging your test messages based on their content or the IP is in a google list (though google tends to block SMTP rather than sending mail to spam in these cases from what I’ve seen).
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