Hello,
I have a few Zimbra Starter email addresses configured for a few days on a domain name that has existed for a year.
The sent mails end up in the SPAM folder of Microsoft 365 addresses.
Yet the DNS are correctly configured; I got a 10/10 on Mail‑Tester.
Is the IP shared by Zimbra Starter listed by Microsoft? Any ideas?
Thanks,
Sébastien
Additionally, emails sent with Outlook with a read receipt request do not receive any receipt in return. Are you also experiencing this issue?
Thank you
A read receipt is a mechanism that requires the cooperation of your counterpart’s client software.
Today, with privacy protection there is virtually no software that sends read receipts, which should rather be called read receipts (read receipt). In the best case a pop‑up window asks you whether to generate this receipt or not. Some software takes it to the extreme by stating that the email was displayed on the screen, which does not mean it was read, nor understood.
The delivery receipt is a different matter. Here it is no longer the client software that generates this receipt, but the mail server. It can be a transit server that indicates to which other server it forwarded the mail, or the final server that indicates the mail was deposited in the recipient’s mailbox. Here it is also a lottery, each server admin can configure the feature, and therefore may generate nothing.
Thank you for your response, it’s enlightening.
The only issue left is that the sent emails don’t reach certain mailboxes. Will switching to Zimbra PRO help with receiving emails that are blocked by Microsoft?
If your emails are delivered to the “spam” or “junk” folder of your recipient, it means the email was correctly delivered.
In general, never never never never should an email disappear. You send an email, it must reach its recipient, OR a non‑delivery error message should be returned to you.
This is where the sending process at OVH breaks all best‑practice guidelines. If OVH detects that your sent email is spam (rightly or wrongly), OVH simply deletes it and does not notify you.
A provider that cares about its customers should not do that.
Back to your question:
Missing? Or classified as spam by your recipients?
Indeed, a sent email should never disappear without an error message being returned if that’s the case. Yet here, we are in that situation.
At first glance, the emails are NOT in spam.
Attention, the whole problem here is that you’re ignoring where the email is deleted.
Gmail, for example, can very well delete emails silently upon receipt, which has been observed several times.
The complicated layer here is that OVH adds another layer by sometimes deleting emails at the point of sending, also silently.
To my knowledge I have never encountered that.
The only case where Gmail can give the impression of making an email disappear upon receipt is when it actually originates from its own servers at sending. In Gmail the folders are not folders but tags, and the arriving email is then a duplicate of the message that is already tagged "Sent items".
However, Gmail can indefinitely defer an email at the SMTP entry with a 4xx error code. One then thinks the email is lost, vanished, whereas it is still in the queue on the sender's side. For a "certain amount of time" the sending server retries periodically, until it reaches its maximum time.
Historically, sendmail defaulted to five days, which made sense in the era of dial‑up lines and uucp for mail transfer.
Today, 24 hours seems to me to be the maximum.
When this period expires, the sending server generates an "Undeliverable" message that is returned to the sender.
No, no, I assure you, I’ve already “lost” emails with Gmail.
Mail sent from my own servers, 200 code, properly accepted, yet it doesn’t arrive in the client’s mailbox, not even in spam. I’ve encountered this several times.
Yes, and the free Outlook / Messenger mailboxes also silently delete emails.
Note that the OVH antispam component is now delegated to Vade Secure, and I think OVH even has to submit a ticket to them when you open a ticket yourself.
That makes me want to set up my own mail server (but I resist, thinking of the hassles it entails and the relatively low perceived value of the product).
If it’s for you, just for fun, why not.
If you’re turning it into a commercial offer, drop it.
Added value too low, a pain to manage support, deliverability issues to handle, customers complaining because “the emails aren’t arriving”, even though your server did deliver the mail and you’re not responsible for what the receiving server does.
In short, thin margins, headaches, support, bad combo 