email TO gmail goes straight to spam

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1101

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#251285 17-Jun-2019 14:14

Hi.
Email from a companies domain email adress's goes straight into gmail spam folders . Its only an issue sending to gmail adresses.

Gmail marks the email with : "Why is this message in spam? It is similar to messages that were identified as spam in the past."

even a test email with no signatures or attachments goes to spam
domain & servers IP not on any blacklists (that I know of, Ive checked several)
spf is setup
PTR is not setup : issues with the ~ISP~ being just a reseller of another ISP's services : I have tried to get PTR setup correctly, so far nothing
As recommended , I used Gmails postmaster tools : pretty much worthless , didnt help at all
Gmail offers a form for BULK email senders: these emails are not bulk emails , just 'normal' business emails to clients

Any advice on how to deal with gmail to stop this domains email's ALL being treated as spam ?

freitasm

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#2259486 17-Jun-2019 14:25

Do you have SPF, DMARC, DKIM, or anything else setup?

Best bet would be to move away from a reseller service to something like Office 365, Google Apps or Zoho Mail. You then control your email settings...

Other than this nothing much can be done if you have no control over the setup.

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SirHumphreyAppleby

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#2259492 17-Jun-2019 14:39

The inner workings of Google are a bit of a mystery, but setting a PTR and using both SPF and DKIM should be sufficient. I have those set up (no DMARC) and my delivery appears reliable, at least to my own GMail account, and people do seem to reply to me.

You can check in GMail to make sure SPF and DKIM validations were successful. Worth checking in case they are set up incorrectly, or mail is going through a system which breaks the DKIM validation.

Otherwise, if there is no PTR at all for your IP, that's the most likely cause. Filtering on PTR not matching seems to be largely a thing of the past thankfully - worse still were the RFC violating systems that blocked mail delivery based on this, which is prohibited.

Another possibility is your IP range being blacklisted due to other users. Not much you can do about that unfortunately, short of requesting a new IP or switching ISPs.

mattwnz

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#2259493 17-Jun-2019 14:42

What does the email host say?

1101

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#2259498 17-Jun-2019 14:51

Thanks for the replies

only SPF is setup. Having issues getting PTR setup , due to internet service being from a reseller (A VOIP phone service seller who bundled internet services into the deal).
So cant contact the actual ISP directly .

Not using ISP's email services. Email is sent from companies SBS server

Obviously something triggered this domains email to all be marked as spam in gmail.
Im trying to find how to get gmail to reset this .

From what Ive googled with others having this issue, DKIM PTR etc didnt help.

Cheers

SirHumphreyAppleby

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#2259499 17-Jun-2019 14:57

1101:

only SPF is setup.

...

From what Ive googled with others having this issue, DKIM PTR etc didnt help.

Fix these first. You will need DKIM and SPF configured even if there is another contributing issue. You may get away without setting the PTR, but other mail servers may reject on this even if Google is satisfied.

Varkk

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#2259501 17-Jun-2019 14:59

One option could be to set up a third party SMTP smarthost and relaying the mail from the SBS exchage out through that. They usually have good step by step guides about how to setup DKIM, SPF, PTR etc to ensure mail is delivered correctly.

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mattwnz

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#2259613 17-Jun-2019 16:08

If one or more people tag the email as spam in Gmail, will that not mean that gmail may see the senders IP as a source of spam? Not sure if Gmail uses RBLs, but I do know that it isn't uncommon for me to find legit emails from companies in the spam folder.

freitasm

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#2259671 17-Jun-2019 18:41

Not necessarily "one or more people". It will be a percentage of the emails sent from a domain but one report alone won't be the cause.

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ANglEAUT

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#2259707 17-Jun-2019 20:11

mattwnz:

If one or more people tag the email as spam in Gmail, will that not mean that gmail may see the senders IP as a source of spam? ...

As stated above, Google's workings are a black box. Google won't just trigger on the IP address, they will also analyse the headers & content.

You can try to get all the current Gmail users that receive your email to mark the emails as "NOT SPAM", thereby untraining Google's algorithms. Get your recipients to set up a rule to "never mark as SPAM" your emails. You would want it to look something like this:

Anecdotally speaking, just reading the subject lines & deleting the emails seems to have taught Google that I do not want "these" emails & started marking them as SPAM.

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MurrayM

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#2259930 18-Jun-2019 08:40

ANglEAUT:

Anecdotally speaking, just reading the subject lines & deleting the emails seems to have taught Google that I do not want "these" emails & started marking them as SPAM.

Yeah I wondered about this. I get emails that are notifications of various things and just getting the email is enough for me to know that something has happened, I don't need to read the actual message. I wondered if deleting these messages without reading them would signal to Gmail that they were unwanted but so far I haven't noticed Gmail doing this.

1101

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#2260014 18-Jun-2019 09:41

Looks like setting the PTR correctly has fixed the issue.

I know for sure after a few days sending test emails
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freitasm

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#2260017 18-Jun-2019 09:43

Go the extra mile and put some time into using a smart MTA, setup PTR, SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Then get a service like DMARC Analyzer or Valimail to monitor results.

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freitasm

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#2260019 18-Jun-2019 09:50

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