R12: Spam Oracle Workflow notification emails

Hi Everyone,

Here is interesting scenario where emails were treated as spams when it went to the external customers from oracle apps. I had the oracle apps system where emails were sent to the end customers who were outside of the company in other words business partner didn't see the notifications. After research found that they were filtered as spam in the recipients mail server.

I can't give the exact name as I have in my setup due to restrictions. consider the example. I had the mail account created like emailid@subdomain.mydomain.com. subdomain.mydomain.com is not visible from outside the company/parters. pinging servers in subdomain.mydomain.com will result in ping failures. After investigation found that notifications are going out of the servers and notifications table contained the records as 'SENT'.

We had to track what happened to the sent mails. After talking to the partners infrastructure team came to know that mails were filtered in recipients mail server as spam. Many mail servers consider the mails as spam if reverse DNS (rDNS) fails or if its not from generic rDNS servers. Anti spam techniques Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-spam_techniques . After creating the workflow email account as emailid@mydomain.com which was DNS resolveable by outsiders issue got resolved.

Visible example cound be www.irecruitment.oracle.com.
Behind the scenes its oracle apps R12 instance. when you register you will get notification mails from Oracle-Workflow-GSI_WW@oracle.com - the workflow notification account. Its rDNS resolveable as its coming from oracle.com domain.

As usaul leave your thoughts.


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