Email to Hotmail Being Sent to Junk Email

[Jason Hung]

Based on my talks with Hotmail staff, my email is failing to send because of certain headers, notably all the X-Spam-* stuff. Is there any way to strip these headers from outbound email?

X-Virus-Scanned: amavisd-new at
X-Spam-Score: -2.599
X-Spam-Level:
X-Spam-Status: No, score=-2.599 tagged_above=-10 required=5 tests=[BAYES_00=-2.599]

I have checked another thread that describes a similar plight. I know some of you may find this hard to believe, but it is causing my emails to Hotmail to be sent to the Junk Email folder.

My question is, is there any way to configure the mail server to strip the X-Spam-*, X-Virus-* headers so that Hotmail's spam filters don't cry wolf? Is there a way to not have it check outbound email? I do not want to set up a relay MTA because the size of our company and the fact that our server is co-located makes it costly for us to add another server just to act as an MTA.

Thanks,

Jason Hung
Network Edition Customer
Optilab, LLC

[vshah]

I just verified this on our NE setup sending mail to my personal hotmail account. My mail was identified as spam by hotmail. I have no idea why since the X-Spam headers said the mail wasn't spam.
I can't believe they are IDing mail as spam simply based on the presence of the X-Spam headers.

Any ideas?

[Jason Hung]

They filter it because statistically a lot of outgoing spam will have X-SPAM-* type headers, or so is the reasoning that the technical support guy gave me...

[anand]

Play with these settings in amavisd.conf.in, specially the first one would be my guess as to what causes the spam headers to be set in ham.

$sa_tag_level_deflt = -10.0; # add spam info headers if at, or above that level
$sa_tag2_level_deflt = %%range VAR:zimbraSpamTagPercent 0 20%%; # add 'spam detected' headers at that level

Also file this in bugzilla as two related enhancements please. Outbound mail should not have any SA headers added, and other option is to not have any SA informational headers added at all.

[Jason Hung]

Will do... I'll give this a shot. Should I file a ticket in the Network Edition support center as well?

Thanks for your help!

[rdargahi]

Jason, filing the enhancements in bugzilla will do the trick. We will get them triaged and slotted into a release asap

[Jason Hung]

I'll do that tomorrow when I get a chance... Too tired to think at this point.

As long as you set your own domains onto the White List and score yourself below -10 (i.e. -11), you won't write the headers onto your email. For example:

I added:

     'opti-lab.com'                           => -10.1,

to

   { # a hash-type lookup table (associative array)
     'nobody@cert.org'                        => -3.0,
     'cert-advisory@us-cert.gov'              => -3.0,
     'owner-alert@iss.net'                    => -3.0,
     'slashdot@slashdot.org'                  => -3.0,
     'bugtraq@securityfocus.com'              => -3.0,
     'ntbugtraq@listserv.ntbugtraq.com'       => -3.0,
     'security-alerts@linuxsecurity.com'      => -3.0,
     'mailman-announce-admin@python.org'      => -3.0,
     'amavis-user-admin@lists.sourceforge.net'=> -3.0,

Opti-lab.com is my domain. Let me know if you have any questions... EDIT: HOTMAIL WORKS LIKE A CHARM WITH THE FIX ABOVE

Jason

[dijichi2]

what would be really nice is to bypass amavis checks if relaying through smtp-auth, at least the spam checks.

[marcmac]

Set up postfix submission on port 587, set the content filter to "" (bypassing amavis) then set your web client to use that port for mail submission. No AS/AV on outgoing mail.

* Details left as an exercise for the reader; I think there's a zimbra wiki on setting up the submission, everything else is in man 5 postconf

[Jason Hung]

Marc,

It works if you add all the local domains to hash whitelist. Then X-SPAM-* headers disappear. No need to bypass virus scanning as I still find that very useful.

Just add

'YOUR DOMAIN NAME'                           => -10.1,

to

 { # a hash-type lookup table (associative array)
     'nobody@cert.org'                        => -3.0,
     'cert-advisory@us-cert.gov'              => -3.0,

.

As long as the hash variable for that domain name is more negative than -10, then it will not look add the X-SPAM-* headers. That way you kill the X-SPAM headers but still keep virus scanning.

Remember, amavis-new has this configuration which requires it to be more negative than -10...

$sa_tag_level_deflt = -10.0; # add spam info headers if at, or above that level
$sa_tag2_level_deflt = %%range VAR:zimbraSpamTagPercent 0 20%%; # add 'spam detected' headers at that level