How to receive emails considered spam?

#1

I (the receiver on MXroute) have been subscribed to a mailing list (the sender host is hubspot.com). Unfortunately I have not be receiving their mailing emails, and after working with their IT, they find in their logs that MXroute is blocking their email because it considers it spam. This is the error they got:

Your message to <@.com> was classified as SPAM. Please add more content, cut down on HTML links, use fewer naughty words etc. Also, ask your IT dept to make sure your mailserver has REVERSEDNS, SPF, 550 DKIM, and is not on any black lists. Your score: 990

A few questions:

  • My “SpamAssassin Setup” settings doesn’t block emails, why would these emails be blocked? I haven’t checked, but would setting the whitelist there help?
  • Related to the whitelist…hypothetically if I wasn’t able to work directly with the sender’s IT person to get their bounce logs, how would I (the receiver) know something incoming has been legitimately blocked? I wouldn’t be able to set the whitelist.
  • What else can I do to get these emails?

Thanks so much!
-Ethan

#2

I’m in the process of making some changes to revert our spam filters to allow more in, while also allowing you more control via the SpamAssassin Setup page. I just need to observe the test server a bit longer before deploying across the fleet. I’d say hold that thought, in relation to that page having the most impact on the inbound filters.

As far as hubspot goes I’m seeing that these rejections happened on the 5th of this month so likely part of some rules that I’ve already relaxed in preparation for those changes. There was one more rejection on the 13th but it was due to a blacklisted IP on spamcop so they’ll be aware that they need to fix that.

It will always be true that we will reject some email before you can whitelist it or before it can reach you. It’s important to note that this is a bare minimum requirement to run an email service, and that all email services do that. The threshold for doing it is up for discussion, and ideally it is at a threshold that won’t catch false positives, but I do want to be clear that there will always exist such a threshold that you cannot override.

#3

Thanks Jarland. I will wait for the changes to take place. I appreciate all that you’re doing :slight_smile: