Forum posts tagged as spam - failing SPF

[Mr-Brunes]

I know forum notification emails never used to work so at least they are being sent out now! :-)
But it seems they are being tagged as spam by Gmail. It was reported below some years back but no one replied and that topic is locked, so I’m reposting here.

https://community.notepad-plus-plus.org/topic/11406/community-mails-land-in-spam-on-gmail?_=1636801373066

From looking at the email headers it’s failing the SPF test.

ARC-Authentication-Results: i=1; mx.google.com;
spf=softfail (google.com: domain of transitioning community@notepad-plus-plus.org does not designate 104.131.212.184 as permitted sender) smtp.mailfrom=community@notepad-plus-plus.org
X-Authentication-Warning: localhost.localdomain: saas set sender to community@notepad-plus-plus.org using -f

How can one contact the forum admins?

[PeterJones]

@mr-brunes ,

The owner/admin of this particular forum is @donho, but he’s busy, and doesn’t necessarily see all @-mentions in the forum. Also, I could be wrong, but I got the impression that he was surprised when the forum emails suddenly started working – it may have been a change on the host’s side (NodeBB is providing free hosting and use of their forum software to our Community, which is awesome of them) – so he might not be able to do anything about it.

You might be able to convince gmail’s spam filter that you want to risk emails from community@notepad-plus-plus.org , so that might be your best bet.

[Mr-Brunes]

@peterjones Yes one doesn’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth.
But failing the SPF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework test is a fundamental issue and not a subjective decision that one can somehow persuade the Gmail filters to accept. It just one of those things that needs to be fixed, not least because NodeBB’s other hosted customers will also likely be affected.

FWIW I received a weird forum overloaded msg just now which, with the best of intentions, seems unlikely so something is amiss somewhere.

"This forum is temporarily unavailable due to excessive load.

We shouldn’t be down for long. Please check back shortly. Sorry for the inconvenience! "

[Mr-Brunes]

FWIW I’ve sent Nodebb a support msg about this.

[Mr-Brunes]

Just to flag up that I’m still seeing this, with exactly the same headers causing the SPF softfails.