Hi,

I have a contact form on my website (hosted with Digital Ocean). The contact form sends form submissions to my Google G-Suite email address. Unfortunately emails are being marked as spam.

My setup

1. I’m managing my DNS with hover.com.
2. I’ve added SPF and a DKIM txt records but emails from the form still end up in my spam folder.
3. I’m using serverpilot.io to manage my Digital Ocean server

Where I’m up to

1. After a bit of digging around the Digital Ocean forum I found out about the PTR record
2. I also discovered mxtoolbox.com, this highlighted another issue that is most likely causing problems with spam
3. mxtoolbox.com, shows I’m also missing a dmarc record.
4. I’ll create a separate post about setting up a dmarc record.

Have I correctly setup my PTR record? This is what I’ve done:

1. My Droplet was called my-company-website
2. I found this ServerPilot guide How to Set PTR Records and Reverse DNS
3. According to the guide:

DigitalOcean will set a PTR record for your server as long as you use a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) like pluto.example.com rather than a single-label hostname like pluto.

1. For this example my domain is mywebsite.co.uk
2. I used digitalocean.mywebsite.co.uk to name my Droplet
3. I logged into Terminal and ran host xx.xxx.xx.xx
4. It shows the domain name pointer is now the same as my droplet name
5. xx.xx.xxx.xx.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer digitalocean.mywebsite.co.uk.
6. The changes appear to be almost instant on the Digital Ocean droplet
7. Testing this in mxtoolbox.com still shows errors, but from reading other posts I need to wait at least 24 hours for these changes to propagate.
8. Have I done this right?
9. Are there any other steps I should take related to PTR record setup?

Kind regards
Stephen Meehan

UPDATE

I’ve not waited 24 hours for the changes to take affect, but it looks like they have partly worked…

I’ve ran a test submission from my contact form on my website, emails are still going to spam. But I thought I’d take a look at the email header to see if I can spot any mention to the updated domain name pointer

It looks like Google Mail can see the update, digitalocean.mywebsite.co.uk. is in the header…

This bit looks like it could be wrong:

Received: from my-company-website.localdomain.example.com (digitalocean.mywebsite.co.uk. [xx.xxx.xx.xx])

It still says Received: from my-company-website. That was the original name of my Droplet

Is that supposed to still say that?

Here’s the full header, I’ve redacted any IP addresses.

Delivered-To: s.meehan@mywebsite.co.uk
Received: by 10.79.31.67 with SMTP id f64csp2990959ivf;
        Thu, 2 Feb 2017 03:50:54 -0800 (PST)
X-Received: by 10.28.45.197 with SMTP id t188mr7968770wmt.15.1486036253973;
        Thu, 02 Feb 2017 03:50:53 -0800 (PST)
Return-Path: <s.meehan@mywebsite.co.uk>
Received: from my-company-website.localdomain.example.com (digitalocean.mywebsite.co.uk. [xx.xxx.xx.xx])
        by mx.google.com with ESMTP id xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
        for <s.meehan@mywebsite.co.uk>;
        Thu, 02 Feb 2017 03:50:53 -0800 (PST)
Received-SPF: softfail (google.com: domain of transitioning s.meehan@mywebsite.co.uk does not designate xx.xxx.xx.xx as permitted sender) client-ip=xx.xxx.xx.xx;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com;
       spf=softfail (google.com: domain of transitioning s.meehan@mywebsite.co.uk does not designate xx.xxx.xx.xx as permitted sender) smtp.mailfrom=s.meehan@mywebsite.co.uk
Received: by my-company-website.localdomain (Postfix, from userid 1000) id 0CD8E40899; Thu,
  2 Feb 2017 11:50:53 +0000 (UTC)
To: s.meehan@mywebsite.co.uk
Subject: Paul - Enquiry
Date: Thu, 2 Feb 2017 11:50:52 +0000
From: Company Name <s.meehan@mywebsite.co.uk>
Reply-To: demoemail@gmail.com
Message-ID: <75aca06ac1bd0890ff9a106e41baca4b@mywebsite.co.uk>
X-Mailer: PHPMailer 5.2.21 (https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

Name:                         Paul Test
Email:                        demoemail@gmail.com
Message:                      
This is a test