Email marked as spam, passes most checks - email

I've configured a server to send legitimate emails, but almost every test I do results in the email getting flagged as spam on gmail.
I've tried sending direct emails from Horde (we're using cPanel), and also emails from Wordpress and Prestashop, but there's not way to make sure these emails don't get marked as spam.
Here's a test on IsNotSpam:
http://www.isnotspam.com/newlatestreport.php?email=ins-ttotqfhw%40isnotspam.com
I've read a lot of guides online, according to which at this stage the emails should not get flagged as spam anymore. The only remaining step I see is TLS, but that requires getting a signed certificate.
How can I ensure the legitimate emails our services send don't get marked as spam?

Related

Detecting if emails send by our application is marked as spam

We are developing an application that will send periodic updates and notifications to users as email. The user can opt-in and opt-out of this service via a subscribe option. However we are finding that some users are making the email as spam and as a result our account is getting suspended... Is there any way to track if our emails has been marked as Spam by a user, so that we can stop sending emails to them...
We have a GSuite service and are using Gmail SMTP to send emails
No.
But you can check if your domain is on any blacklist with tools like mxtoolbox.com. And contact those blacklists with the question what you could do to be removed from the list.
In order for a mail to be classified as spam it has to fail a multitude of tests maybe your mails have specific words in the title or the senders address is way to weird or the header is getting corrupted in a certain way or and maybe that's your problem: many people are custom filtering your emails as junk/spam.

reply emails are bounced due to URL in content

I have a client who communicates with me via email. Crazy, I know.
Here is the issue: When I send him an email from Mac Mail — with my URL in the footer – he receives it. However, when he tries to reply from his gmail account, my server bounces it back to him. The error is "554 rejected due to spam content". (a false-positive)
I can not collect the Spam Checker data from his email headers, as he is not tech savvy. I can not duplicate the error using a gmail account of my own. I have eliminated all possible problems, except the URL in my footer, which triggers this every time.
My email server is: 01-ah-r28u33-ss05.alphahosting.com
His gmail server is: mail-ob0-f172.google.com
Both of these (and also my test gmail server) are shared servers and have some blacklist reports. However, I have no such problems from other clients. My concern is that this could be a reporting problem, and I am failing to hear from those who would rather delete my email than give me a call. I think that you can understand my concern.
Please help, and do let me know if you need any other data that I might add in here.

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.

How to avoid marked as spam by Gmail on sending mass email?

I created event registration web sites (you can imagine something like http://www.eventbrite.com/), which allow users to subscribe for event updates. When subscribed, we send mass emails (with the same content) to those users.
It was ok before, but recently I noticed that GMail always put the email into Spam folder.
As any texts would always go to Spam folder, I suspect that my domain was blacklisted by Gmail.
1) Is there a way to request google to put my domain into the whitelist?
2) Let's say it can't and I decide to register for new domain.
Is there a way to avoid the mass email to be marked as spam by Gmail? (may be something like what Facebook email notification do?)
Yes, don't send mass email :-) If you really want to avoid being considered a spammer, send out emails with less recipients, and don't swamp the mail server with them. Let's say, for example, you have thirty recipients for a given update. You can send out emails with one recipient every minute for a half hour.
Now the numbers may be different (and will of course depend on the success of your site) but the basic theory will stand up for quite a while.
As to how to get yourself whitelisted in GMail, that's really up to the recipient. They can usually do it by simply adding your email address to their contact list.
Keep in mind whitelisting there refers to individual GMail accounts, GMail itself does not whitelist IP addresses.
It does blacklist them if you misbehave but that generally means you get delivery rejects when trying to send. The fact that your messages are going in to the mail system and being delivered to spam folders indicates that this is an account-based thing, not a global GMail blacklisting of your IP/domain.
In any case, the place to report problems for GMail delivery problems is here.
As a school, we send out mass emails to our parents about events and issues. There's no way we have the time to spend sending out one email per minute. What we did was sign up with AOL as a business account, and we are allowed to do "bulk mailings" until they get multiple complaints. However, gmail clients usually have to list us as a valid sender or else those emails end up in spam folders. Works the same for clients using college alumni accounts from edu addresses. Gmail is the only one who regularly gives us this problem for our recipients on their email servers. We let parents know at orientation that they will have to specifically admit our emails via some setting on gmail.

Create a lot of 200 different Email Accounts in a short span of time?

I am trying to send bulk email from a few accounts email accounts, and for some reason, I think the emails get blocked and they do not reach the recipient. I think it is because of spam / filtering rules. Is it possible for me to create say 100 different email accounts in a very short amount of time and send 1 email from each of the accounts ?
Is there any service/ idea / script to create a lot of email accounts in a very short amount of time ?
Creating 100+ accounts on your own server would be pointless. It's usually the originating server and isp and/or the email's content that causes it to be flagged as spam. Creating 100+ accounts elsewhere MAY work, but then each of those other servers may also be considered as a spam source and any mails you send from that particular account will go missing as well.
You can check your mail server's logs to see if the mails get dumped by the receiving mail server. Some of them will do the filtering right at the initial connection/send attempt. However, some will pretent to accept the mail (and you see a 200 OK acceptance message), but then toss the mail in the trash automatically. In this case, you'd nave no idea what happened, as everything would appear to have worked fine.
I had set it up easily using Yahoo Mail Plus. They had the feature of Disposable Email Accounts. You can create 500 of them !