Question
How to setup a PTR record?
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
- I’m managing my DNS with hover.com.
- I’ve added
SPF
and aDKIM
txt records but emails from the form still end up in my spam folder. - I’m using serverpilot.io to manage my Digital Ocean server
Where I’m up to
- After a bit of digging around the Digital Ocean forum I found out about the
PTR record
- I also discovered mxtoolbox.com, this highlighted another issue that is most likely causing problems with spam
- mxtoolbox.com, shows I’m also missing a
dmarc
record. - 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:
- My
Droplet
was calledmy-company-website
- I found this ServerPilot guide How to Set PTR Records and Reverse DNS
- 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.
- For this example my domain is
mywebsite.co.uk
- I used
digitalocean.mywebsite.co.uk
to name myDroplet
- I logged into Terminal and ran
host xx.xxx.xx.xx
- It shows the
domain name pointer
is now the same as my droplet name xx.xx.xxx.xx.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer digitalocean.mywebsite.co.uk.
- The changes appear to be almost instant on the Digital Ocean droplet
- 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.
- Have I done this right?
- 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
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