Transactional emails being flagged as spam

#1

I have a customer whose website contact form emails are being flagged as spam, causing them to be overlooked and lose potential sales.

I’m primarily a website developer, and well aware of the issues that some contact form emails present. In order to address this I ensure:

  • The ‘from’ address is the customer’s domain (website@cust.domain)
  • The ‘reply-to’ address is that of the person who filled out the contact form
  • I use a transactional email service (Sparkpost)
  • Transactional email is set up properly for SPF and DKIM (email headers confirm passes)
  • In spamassassin I have whitelisted the ‘from’ email address

I’m at a loss what else I can do to get these emails delivered to the customer’s inbox. They are on the verge of switching to a different email service as a result, and if this repeats across all my customers I will need to do so to.

Any suggestions gratefully received.

#2

On the emails ending up in the spam folder, correct? or just in general?

#3

All emails sent using the transactional mail service pass SFP & DKIM tests.

#5

Emails sent from the client’s domain (I set up a test account) score 10/10 on Email Tester. It’s only spam checking on inbound emails that’s an issue. Although at the moment no emails at all are arriving!

#7

Chill out, man. You asked me to do ONE thing (send to mail tester) which was superceded by the bigger RBL issue.

Adjusting the SpamAssassin score does seem to have resolved the immediate problem at the moment, but I’m surprised that genuine contact form enquires, sent via a transactional mail service, from an address whitelisted in SpamAssassin and with non-spammy content were falling foul. When I have time I’ll set up a duplicate page & form that will send to Mail Tester and see what that says. That won’t tell me why whitelisting appears to have no impact, though.

I really appreciate your input, but I sincerely hope you are not part of the MXroute team. Your customer service skills are a tad abrasive.

#9

Thanks Jarland. Are you able to explain what impact whitelisting should have on inbound mail? I would expect it to ensure that all mail from that sender reaches the inbox, but that wasn’t my experience. Is it just changing the spam score slightly?

#10

Have forwarded one of the emails to the support address now too. Appreciate you looking into this.

#6

That issue was caused by a major RBL not renewing their domain name. Amazing what damage not paying a less than $20 bill can cause.

Every single thing I have asked you to do to test, you have blown off.

Setting up a test account and sending mail from it does NOTHING to test sending from your app. Stating that all emails sent using the transactional mail service pass SPF and DKIM does not specifically confirm whether or not the emails ending up in spam are included. I asked you to CONFIRM this, but you chose not to.

I can’t offer you any suggestions if you do not cooperate. Have a nice day.

#4

Then it is likely that the content of the email is an issue.

Have you directed a test mail to to the email address provided by https://mail-tester.com? If so what do they say? Please post the results link here for review.

#8

Happy to break down the reasons for any rejections and give you a report on it anytime. Just toss me sender, recipient, subject if possible, any errors received, expected behavior vs actual, to support@mxroute.com.

#11

Should bypass all filters, but it has to be the MAIL FROM in the SMTP transaction prior to DATA, not the From header which is mostly cosmetic. You’d see this as Envelope From.