I used to main­tain a pri­vate wiki for my book­marks. That let me anno­tate and group related links together but there were obvi­ously things that weren’t great about it: mostly that it couldn’t really be machine parsed with­out a bit of a headache so it was just a wiki, I couldn’t use that infor­ma­tion else­where. Along came del.icio.us which is just the great­est thing ever. I started using that and stopped using my wiki completely.

But, there were still a lot of infor­ma­tion in that wiki which I wanted to get into del.icio.us, so this hol­i­day break I’ve been check­ing all those wiki links and putting the ones that are still rel­e­vant into del.icio.us. I’ve come across one entry that was some notes rather than links, taken from some CFTalk post­ings I think. I want to pre­serve these for future use so I’m gonna post them here: how to stop cfmail mes­sages from being flagged as spam. If you have any more tips please post them in the comments!

• Send mes­sage to checker@arp3.com
  This spam assas­sin tool will return a report on your mes­sage, by email. I’m sure there’s other ways of doing this too — I used a form based ser­vice to check the mes­sage text recently. Or you could send the mes­sage to a spam assassin-enabled account and look at the head­ers upon arrival.
• SPF tags in DNS entries:
  http://spf.pobox.com/wizard.html
  http://www.anti-spamtools.org/SenderIDEmailPolicyTool/Default.aspx
  SPF is the Sender ID Frame­work, some­thing Microsoft it try­ing to imple­ment I think. I haven’t read into it a great deal but accord­ing to the sec­ond link, the idea is you cre­ate a SPF record for your DNS domain which says “I only send mail from these machines”. You then add this DNS record to your domain’s DNS con­fig­u­ra­tion. What I haven’t worked out yet is who pays atten­tion to this DNS infor­ma­tion. Prob­a­bly not many peo­ple as yet!
• Change cfmail mailerid=“Microsoft Out­look, Build 10.0.3416″
  Because appar­ently spam­mers don’t use Out­look. Makes sense I guess.
• Change cfmail from=’”#mailoutSender#” <#mailout­SenderE­mail#>‘
  Appar­ently this makes the sender look more like a real account.
• Required head­ers that cfmail doesn’t include by default:
  • <cfmail­param name=“Message-Id” value=”<#createUUID()#@yourdomain.com.au>”>
  • <cfmail­param name=“Reply-To” value=”#get_mailout.mailoutSenderEmail#”>
  • more info on message-id and reply-to: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2822.html
    – sec­tion 3.6
  • <cfmail­param name=“MIME-Version” value=“1.0″>
• Finally, for more info on mime ver­sions see http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2045.html — sec­tion 4.