Today I had a customer whose mail was not arriving at it’s destination. IN my customers case, they knew that it was arriving at the destination but going into the spam folder. This is likely due to blacklisting, however some ISP or clients dont know it’s reaching the spam folder at the other end, and since the most common cause of this happening is due to a missing SPF (Sending policy framework record), MX record or DKIM record it is possibly to rapidly check the DNS of each using dig, if the sender domain is known.

To check for the IP Blacklistings on a mailserver use it’s ip in one of the many spam a checker;

https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=blacklist

In other cases it might be being caused by email bounces, due to the PTR, MX or DKIM records, and not even getting into the inbox, you can see that on the sending mail server using a simple grep command;

cat /var/log/maillog | grep -i status=bounced

You probably want to save the file as well

cat /var/log/maillog | grep -i status=bounced > bouncedemail.txt 

If you wanted to know which domains bounced email, if you’ve ensured all sending domains are correctly configured via DNS..

[root@api ~]# cat /var/log/maillog | grep -i status=bounced | awk '{print $7}'
to=<[email protected]>,
to=<[email protected]>,

You could use sed to extract which domains failed..

Then you could use whois against the domains to reach out to the email contact with some automation that explains that ‘weve checked DKIM, MX and SPF and all are configured correctly and believe this is an error on your behalf, etc, blah blah’..

Such a thing would be a good idea to implement for some large email providers, and I’m sure you could automate the DNS checking as well. You could likely automate the whole thing, just by watching the logs and DNS records, and some intelligent grep and awking.

Not bad.