How to test spam and bounce complaints on PowerMTA - email

I'm trying to create a system that handles spam and bounce complaints on PowerMTA, but I don't know how to simulate complaints. I'm afraid that I might mark our IP address as a spammer if I click "Report Spam" on Gmail or Yahoo to test.
In Amazon SES, I can just send an email to complaint#simulator.amazonses.com. Is there a similar tool for PowerMTA?
Thanks!

There are great answers on this post: Service for testing bounced email handling
Now I just have to figure out how to simulate spam complaints from the feedback loop.

Related

SendGrid smtp not sending to Yahoo, AOL, or Verizon.net but sends to Gmail?

(Disclaimer I'm fairly new to development in general and this is my first StackOverflow post all and any feedback is greatly appreciated.)
I'm posting here because I'm on a free SendGrid account and their support team has yet to get back to respond and it's been over a week and I'm dying to solve this issue.
Currently, I'm using Sendgrid as an SMTP and recently my emails have stopped sending to the following esp Yahoo, AOL, and Verizon.net but emails send to Gmail just fine.
Because emails still send to Gmail I used "Email Header Analyzer" via mxtoolbox.com to review and meet the recommendations provided. Which I have implemented on. (See screenshot)
The only thing not checked off is the "DKIM Authenticated" in which it's my understanding that when you verify the domain you're using to send emails with SendGrid takes care of that for you.
It's not the email function itself because it sends just fine to Gmail.
My question is has anyone else experienced this issue? If so what was the fix you did that made it work?
Screenshot of my email header analyzer results:
Turns out that my SendGrid account was over the daily email sending limit for the "free plan" and the emails that were sent correctly to Gmail had been doing so because of a pre-existing mail function (not using SendGrid even though SendGrid was still logging these emails).
I figured out this was happening by looking at the "mailed-by:" info when you toggle the drop-down above the email just under the sender email address. Mailed-ByView With SendGrid it would say "mail-by: sendgird.net" SendGird-Mailed-ByView
It would have been nice if SendGrid made my sending limit information a little more apparent but you can find this information about your account by going to "Settings">"Account Details">"Your Products." YourProductsView

SendGrid Emails Getting Rejected as Spam

I'm making a user management system for my app, and I need to send users a "forgot my password" email with a token that lets them reset their account password. I signed up for SendGrid through Azure (to get the 25,000 emails per month free, which sounded like a great deal) and wrote some code to use it, but after testing my program a bit I was dismayed to find that only a couple of my emails actually went through.
After going onto the SG control panel, I found that 4 out of the 6 test emails I sent went through, and all of the others were rejected as being spam. I sent an email to mail-tester.com to see what it though my spam score was and it gave me a 4.3/10.
The email in question was a single sentence with a link to the password reset, without any images or other elements. I only sent those 6 emails out, so the volume of my emails definitely wasn't the issue. Still, I'm very puzzled as to why my messages are getting flagged as spam.
Without going to the trouble of making an elaborate authentication setup, are there any basic changes I can make to my system to make it get through to users?
In this case it's most likely because you are sending such a short message, with a link to 'reset your password' from a non-whitelabelled email address (the email address you're sending from cannot be verified against the actual domain), and the link may also be a different URL. It's probably getting pulled up as a potential phishing email.
You can rectify this by white labeling your domain and email links via the SendGrid dashboard, it's easy to do and should improve your deliverability.
Also check out this article from the SendGrid support team about White Labeling.
A question from 2015 which is sadly still relevant today as usage of SendGrid increases.
My organization has blocked all SendGrid mails except for those on the paid tier using fixed IP addresses with resolvable public DNS names (such as sendgrid1.sampledomain.tld) which we then whitelist.
There are now far too many domain impersonation, phishing and other spam mails coming in from SendGrid for us to allow everything from them - roughly 10 000 mails over a seven day period, which is far too many to manually report to SendGrids abuse department.
So my answer would be that switching to the paid tier of SendGrid is the better option if you like a better chance of your mails arriving intact at their destination.
I receive only Spam Mails from Sendgrid.
Goes direct to Spam folder and try to report Sendgrid everywhere I can. Maybe they get blocked by most mail servers and make them think about their policy in "hosting" all these Spammers.
In my case my emails are marked as spam because of the anchor label different to the href being actually called.
And that's because of the 'click tracking' setting of sendgrid.
So, if you have something like
yourdomain.com
sendgrid may replace the href and you end up with something like:
yourdomain.com
The sendgrid page being called tracks the click and then redirects the user to the url you originally set. But this sometimes results in your email being marked as spam.
Try to set 'click tracking' in sendgrid dashboard to off: settings | tracking | click tracking.
details here: https://sendgrid.com/docs/ui/account-and-settings/tracking/
Always start by setting up Domain Authentication, formerly known as domain whitelabel as #MartynDavies says. Found under Settings -> Sender Authentication in the UI. Should look like this:
https://sendgrid.com/docs/ui/account-and-settings/how-to-set-up-domain-authentication/
To identify problems have a look at Activity and choose to see deferred, drops, bounces, blocks and spam reports.
https://app.sendgrid.com/email_activity
Under Suppressions you can see details for Blocks and Bounces among others:
https://app.sendgrid.com/suppressions/blocks
https://app.sendgrid.com/suppressions/bounces
There you can see errors like:
550 5.7.1 SPF check failed. em1234.mydomain.com does not declare 11.222.33.44 as a valid sender
If it says Verified but you see errors like this then contact SendGrid support.
One thing that has worked is to upgrade from the Free plan to Essentials or Bronze via the Azure Portal. This made a lot of the emails marked as spam pass through.
I had a similar issue when trying to send a user verification email using SendGrid.
In my case, using a custom domain as the sender identity solved the issue.
Make sure to also verify the domain before using it.

Is SMTP plugin important for WordPress?

I have a website based on WordPress.
Every page has his own Contact form.
I am using Configure SMTP
+ Contact7
(SMTP is setup to user Gmail as a SMTP server).
After a while I'm curious why I am actually doing it this way.
Is Gmail that secure or it is only about SSL?
Is WP build in mail function secure (and good) enough to use it?
In total: what is the best way to make contact form in WordPress and avoiding my mails getting to the spam folder?
I was told that the solution descriped above (Gmail SMTP) is the best way, is it?
Well, the build-in mail function works fine for most uses, like sending "Password lost" or "New user registered" mails or even contact forms.
If you send more than just a few (can´t name a number) mails via contact forms, newsletters etc. you will probably want to use a mailserver for that, either an external one (GMail) or a properly configured internal one. They go much easier past spam protection because they are known for sending mails and are probably whitelisted at the big mail providers. Your webhost most probably is not and might be considered as spam very fast when he is sending mails regularly.
If you want to send a lot of mails in a short span of time you should probably go one step further and choose a service like Mailchimp or something similar for that. Their business is sending newsletters and so nobody (means the mail providers) wonders, when they have lots of mails incoming from one of those servers.
For your use case I would stick to SMTP via GMail, when it works fine for you. As you are not sending lots of mails in a short span of time you´ll have only little problems with getting rated as spam and you also have a trusted server sending those mails. Seems fine for me.

edm being flagged as SPAM by hotmail

I have sent out 5 different edm with different content to a group of people. 4 of them could reach the mailbox of yahoo, gmail and hotmail successfully.
The problem is that the remaining 1 being flagged as SPAM by hotmail. (It can reach the mailbox of yahoo and gmail successfully)
Does anyone know why?
This can be down to a number things.
If you sent the emails out quite quickly then the receiving email server may just flag it as spam.
The other thing that it could be is that you are using a phrase that the hotmail spam filter is picking up on. I suggest running your email through something like spamassassin to see what it would score.
If its still got a good score then maybe you need to be affiliated with the hotmail feedback loop so that they can let you know when someone hits "This is spam" button.
IF that doesnt work then you may need to see if your IP address has been blocked by hotmail. If you want to do email direct marketing, the IP address normally has to be whitelisted by the email provider and potentially spamhaus so they know you aren't a spammer.

how to get through spam filters?

I sent 3 emails last week as replies from our website. None received them! One was yahoo, hotmail and an overseas domain. I am wondering if it's not a good idea to open a yahoo account with our domain name as the user just to reply to prospective buyers.
Your mail server's IP may have been black listed. This is common on shared servers.
http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
First, check dnsbl.info to see if your mailserver's IP is blocked by any of the blacklists. If they are, contact the blacklist administrator to investigate removing the block.
If your email is business critical, then you need to get a dedicated server with a white-hat hosting company, control over DNS to set up your SPF/SenderID record, and to register with the Hotmail, AOL and Yahoo postmasters for whitelisting and feedback loops. Most of these will only accept requests for dedicated servers, where you have 100% control over the email they send.
If you are using an online contact form, make people double-enter their email address and check the entries match - otherwise you'll have no end of typos, which are naturally undeliverable and frustrating for both you and your customers.
You could also try looking at gmail for domains. It's what I use and so far I haven't had a problem withany spam filters. Also make sure that you are not writing the content of the message to where a spam filter could flag it as spam. There's some guides on the net somewhere. I found out that by removing the word "free" from the message the emails started going though (before I was on gmail).