My site sends a lot of email through php. None of it is getting through to hotmail. so I installed PhpMailer. that doesn't work either so i contacted hotmail. they said:
[
One way
to positively impact the reputation of your IP is to obtain SPF/Sender ID
records. You indicated you are in the process creating an SPF record.
SO, I have gone to:
http://openspf.org/wizard.html?mydomain=mydomain.com&x=31&y=6
The 'spf wizard' is really ambiguous and i have no idea what values to enter there. Can anyone help with these questions?
1) mydomain.com's IP address is xx.xx.xx.xx.
Does that server send mail from mydomain.com? yes or no.
mydomain.com is hosted by a dedicated server running ENSIM. sadly, mail seems to come from xx.xx.xx.56 but the domain seems mapped to xx.xx.xx.57. there are no other domains at all associated with this server. is that a yes or no?
2) This wizard found 2 names for the MX servers for mydomain.com: mydomain.com and mail. (A single machine may go by more than one hostname. All of them are shown.)
MX servers receive mail for mydomain.com.
Do they also send mail from mydomain.com?
yes no
What??? There is only one machine. any subdomains like www.mydomain.com and mydomain.mydomain.com and foo.mydomain.com are ALL THE SAME MACHINE. What are they really asking here? I don't have any subdomains called mx.mydomain.com
3) Do you want to just approve any host
whose name ends in mydomain.com? (Expensive, unreliable and not recommended)
That sounds really convenient but is not recommended. 🙁
no i guess?
4) Do any other servers send mail from mydomain.com?
You can describe them by giving "arguments" to the a:, mx:, ip4:, and ptr: mechanisms. mx: takes domain names and approves all the MX servers of these domains. To keep the wizard short we left out ptr:, but it works analogously.
regular hostnames
domain names
IP networks can be entered using CIDR notation, eg. 192.0.2.0/24
Ok this one doesn't have yes/no in the answer field--it has 3 text areas. i'm guessing i leave them blank? On the other hand, given that my webserver is xx.xx.xx.57 and my mail server is xx.xx.xx.56, maybe i want to add that here? what is CIDR notation?
5) Could mail from mydomain.com originate through
servers belonging to some other domain?
If you send mail through your ISP's servers, and the ISP has published an SPF record, name the ISP here.
Ok this question has a text input field labeled 'include'. with one 'example.com' in there. the answer is no for me but damn this form is confusing.
6) Do the above lines describe all the hosts that send mail from mydomain.com?
yes no
JESUS. The ONLY server that sends mail through or for mydomain.com is MYDOMAIN.COM. I'm guessing yes.
7) IN TXT (has a text area containing what appear to be results)
it says:
"v=spf1 ip4:xx.xx.xx.xx a mx ~all"
Not sure what to do with that. Any help would be much appreciated here.
