Hotmail Sender ID always fails with “temperror” regardless of SPF

Question

When we send mail to Hotmail servers, they do not recognize our Sender ID. In the receiving mail source, it reads

Authentication-Results: hotmail.com; sender-id=temperror ...

when it should say pass as with every other one. Therefore our legitimate mails go to junk folder.

A few things to point:
- SPF is correctly done and works with every other big email providers such as Yahoo, Gmail etc.
- We submitted our Sender ID long time ago.
- We have signed up for JMR program.
- We have tried all of the steps above with another domain of ours and different IPs as well, nothing changed.

We have been getting this error for weeks. I wonder how people who have "pass" in the header do this.

I am aware that Sender ID is not the only thing affects deliverability, but I need to fix only Sender ID, as it seems to be hardest one to solve and probably this is the only problem we have. IP and domain are both new, and not on any blacklist.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Seem to be a bug on hotmail side. I have same problem as you since 3 months, some domains with same spf records than other domains, are failing with senderid=temperror.

I have wrote to hotmail, they tell me it's a bug on their side (maybe on their dns cache), and they are working "actively" to resolv it ...

hotmail sucks ....

Answer 2

I don't know what the question should be, so I do assume: "How to check SPF records?"

Best guess is to visit http://www.kitterman.com/spf/validate.html, fill out the form(s) and check for errors. You will probably see no errors, otherwise Google would reject it right away. But you may see warnings. Take care of warnings, fix them and you will see.

And then you should be aware that Sender ID is not SPF. See the Wikipedia entry and the OpenSPF website (when it'll be back online). But there are even more resources.

Answer 3

Try sending a message to port25's verifier address mailrcheck-auth@verifier.port25.com. You may want to review my experiences in Detecting Email Server Forgery. The article includes a list of verification services which may help you track your problem.