SPF issue: what causes softfail?

Question

Whenever I use PHP to send emails to members of my site, the email ends up in the spam folder for most email providers like Gmail and Hotmail.

When I check the original source in Gmail, I see the following:

Delivered-To: mypersonalmail@gmail.com
Received: by 10.236.41.34 with SMTP id g22cs272510yhb;
Wed, 1 Jun 2011 05:38:27 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.236.77.102 with SMTP id c66mr7228248yhe.303.1306931907131; Wed, 01 Jun 2011 05:38:27 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: softfail (google.com: best guess record for domain of transitioning info@mywebserver.com does not designate as permitted sender)
Received: by 10.190.5.195 with POP3 id 3mf1156376yxt.72; Wed, 01 Jun 2011 05:38:27 -0700 (PDT) X-Gmail-Fetch-Info: info@mywebserver.com 14 mail.mywebserver.com 110 info@mywebserver.com
Return-path:
Envelope-to: info@mywebserver.com
Received: from mybestsh by s01.next-web.nl with local (Exim 4.69)
(envelope-from )
id 1QRkgT-0000BF-3v
for info@mywebserver.com; Wed, 01 Jun 2011 14:38:01 +0200
To: info@mywebserver.com
Subject: Your new password
MIME-Version: 1.0
From: MyServer
Reply-To: MyServer
X-Sender: MyServer

I have set up my SPF records as follows:

v=spf1 a mx ip4:xxx.xxx.xx.xx-all

I am wondering what causes the softfail. Any ideas?

Answer 1

The Return-Path header is empty. This means that during the SMTP conversation, the MAIL FROM command did not specify an email address where bounces are sent. It is the domain from this email address that SPF tests. If there is no email address, a softfail will result.

Answer 2

Its gonna be difficult to answer this without the real info (involved IPs, domainname, sender adress, full spf record etc). It also looks like this message wasn't sent to gmail directly, but retrieved from your server via Gmail Fetch (Header X-Gmail-Fetch-Info ), which makes the analysis even more complicated.

here are a few possibilities:

• invalid SPF record (in your example there is no space between the IP and -all )
• wrong IP address in the SPF record
• your server doesn't send mails directly, mail is sent over a smarthost instead which is missing in the SPF record
• SPF isn't the problem (eg. your mail doesn't have a Date Header which can cause it to be flagged as spam as well, From/Reply-To/X.Sender are no real email addresses, ...)

Answer 3

That means you are sending mail using email address which is not yours (e.g. your smtp server has domain name CompanyABC.COM while your're sending email whith sender: someone@CompanyDDD)