Problem with PF's email configuration?

[vela]

Just recently, notification emails from PF started ending up in my junk mailbox, so I took a look at the headers today and found this:

X-Spam-known-sender: no ("Email failed DMARC policy for domain")
X-Spam-sender-reputation: 0 (email; expectedauth)
X-Spam-score: 8.5
X-Spam-hits: HEADER_FROM_DIFFERENT_DOMAINS 0.248, HTML_MESSAGE 0.001, ME_HAS_VSSU 0.001,
ME_QUARANTINE 5, ME_SC_NH -0.001, ME_SENDERREP_DENY 4,
RCVD_IN_DNSWL_LOW -0.7, SPF_HELO_PASS -0.001, SPF_PASS -0.001,
T_SCC_BODY_TEXT_LINE -0.01, LANGUAGES en, BAYES_USED none,
SA_VERSION 3.4.6
X-Spam-source: IP='43.228.184.84', Host='a1i84.smtp2go.com', Country='US',
FromHeader='com', MailFrom='com'
X-Spam-charsets: plain='utf-8', html='utf-8'
X-IgnoreVacation: yes ("Email failed DMARC policy for domain")

It looks like DMARC isn't set up correctly for the domain physicsforums.com.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Boo thanks I’ll check tomorrow

 

[jack action]

At least you have email notifications. As I was saying in this post a year ago, I still don't receive them anymore. I solely rely on the RSS feed now.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

hmmm this is saying it passes
https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=dmarc:physicsforums.com&run=toolpage

 

[vela]

I opened a ticket with my email host since I'm not an expert in deciphering email headers. I'll post what they think is going on when they get back to me.

 

[vela]

I switched to my Gmail address to receive notifications last night and received two early this morning. According to Google, both messages failed DMARC, so it looks like there probably is a problem on PF's end.

smtp.mailfrom="bT.yc7jkiqb30=frw9nf2rls6d=2k79d3e5m0@track.smtp2go.com";
dmarc=fail (p=QUARANTINE sp=QUARANTINE dis=NONE) header.from=physicsforums.com

 

[jack action]

Rereading the OP, the SpamAssassin score in "X-Spam-score" is way over 5, which is the usual limit for spam. It didn't fail DMARC: DMARC says you must quarantine - hence fail - when it is considered spam; and it is.

The two big failed tests are ME_QUARANTINE (5) and ME_SENDERREP_DENY (4). I didn't find the first one anywhere, but https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360060591413-Spam-filtering It looks like it is based on your opinion (the receiver):

This score will be applied to the ME_SENDERREP* SpamAssassin tags, and will be based on your personal reputation for the sender.

 

[vela]

You spurred me to look into how DMARC and DKIM work. Messages from PF are failing DKIM and therefore failing DMARC. PF's policy for failed messages is to quarantine them. That's what ME_QUARANTINE signifies. ME_SENDERREP_DENY is probably set because it looks like the message is from a sender spoofing physicsforums.com.

I think the problem is that there's no TXT record for s35221._domainkey.physicsforums.com, which is where the public key for the domain is supposed to be.

Authentication-Results: mx1.messagingengine.com;
dkim=invalid (public key: not available, 0-bit key sha256)
header.d=physicsforums.com header.i=@physicsforums.com
header.b=BODxOJAT header.a=-sha256 header.s=s35221 x-bits=0;

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Ok I've added the dkim record according to my SMTP provider. I know I set this up in the past. Very strange the record went missing. Maybe when we moved DNS to Cloudflare. Thanks so much for the heads up! Let me know if you still see issues.

 

[vela]

It's working now both at Google and at Fastmail.