Help, my outgoing emails are getting marked as spam by Google recipients

[Ham]

either spam or ham^[1].


_{[1] Technical term, the opposite of spam.}

You bet.


Well, with all this about SPF I thought it would be useful to enable. Quite clearly, many spammers are spoofing my domain(s) as I get bounced mail back into my inbox, I thought SPF might help stop the domains being used by spammers. Except it is active by default on my ISP, here's the record  v=spf1 +a +mx +ip4:46.249.223.230 ?all

That should mean that only that server should be able to send mail from my domains. Only. I use Gmail to send all mail, and it works fine.

I'm puzzled.

(Not currently on any black lists but you never can tell)

[Kim]

SPF doesn't stop people sending emails with your domain on them.  Anyone with a telnet client can do that.  All it does is tells a spam filter that a given email probably came from a legitimate source, or not.  Bounces are tricky, because they tend to happen before a spam filter gets involved (eg. when an account doesn't exist).  Preventing backscatter from legitimate bounces is non-trivial.

That aside, the "?all" means that mail for your domain coming from any IP other than 46.249.223.230 and those listed in the domain's A and MX records (which are positively verified by the SPF test) is treated neutrally.  Change it to "-all" so that random servers fail the test.

[frankly frankie]

As a non-expert user, I am surprised to have needed to go into this level of detail to solve a problem which ought to have been pre-configured for me on opening my account with 1&1.  I cannot believe that all their hundreds of thousands of email customers can be expected to have to write their own SPF records!

Just FWIW -
I have domain hosting with 1&1 and use their mail servers, and so does my partner Sheila - in her case quite a high volume of often business-oriented email.  I do get occasional blacklisting problems on the domains - shared server - it comes and goes and never lasts long but IMO once a domain has been blacklisted (rightly or wrongly) then it's tainted forever. 
But these problems such as they are seem to relate mainly to web traffic.  I'm not aware of any undue spam-marking of emails.  Though I do only send outgoing mails in plain text - no HTML mail. 
In Sheila's case her busy inbox is set to copy/forward all incoming mail to a Gmail address (for use on her phone) and that Gmail inbox doesn't seem to have any problems with the large number of mails being forwarded in from a 1&1 server.

[Charlotte]

Bit of an update:

Looks like with the help of several awesome forummites and the less-awesome tech support from 1&1, it's sorted.  I've got an SPF and a TXT record and it's going to stay like that because half a dozen test emails have all got through.  FWIW, I was never blacklisted by anyone, it was just the lack of a suitable SPF record.  The weird thing is that some recipients want to see it as a TXT file and some want to see it as an SPF file.  It would appear that there's no uniformly accepted standard of how to promise that your email that originates from a given server is likely to be legit.  Very frustrating.

Thank you to everyone who's helped 

[Kim]

SPF was originally created as a bodge using TXT records, before the concept of an SPF record was added to DNS servers.  Hence there are systems that understand one but not the other, so you need both.  'twas ever thus.

[Woofage]

Sorry, bit late to this.

We had a minor problem with server-generated e-mails going into Googlemail's spam folders a couple or so years back. At the time I did some digging that led to the addition of the following 2 TXT records for our domain:

Code: [Select]

v=spf1 include:<mailserver address> -all
v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all
The first line came from the ISP's help files. The second line is from Google's documentation. Things are certainly better now.

[Afasoas]

Today I've just learned that there are sending quotas in Gmail and Google Apps for Business. Google limits the number of emails you can send each day. It looks like the limit is quite low (100 emails per day) for newly created accounts and increases over time. Currently for us it seems to be 1850 emails a day. Don't ask me how I know.


Here's a useful Google Apps Script that can send a warning email when the quota is closed to being breached. If you know what your quota is...

Code: [Select]

// Counts the number of emails sent today. If the total exceeds 1600, sends a warning message
function CountSentItems() {
  var formattedDate = Utilities.formatDate(new Date(), "GMT", "yyyy/MM/dd");
  const mailSearchMax = 500
  var mailSearchstart = 0
  var sentConversationsCount = 0

  while( sentConversationsCount % mailSearchMax == 0){
    var conversations = GmailApp.search('in:sent after:' + formattedDate, sentConversationsCount, 500);
    if (conversations.length == 0){
      break
    }
    sentConversationsCount += conversations.length
  }

  if (sentConversationsCount >= 1600) {
    GmailApp.sendEmail('blah@blah.blah', '!! Email Quota Warning !!', sentConversationsCount + ' emails have been sent from blah@blah.blah. The Gmail quota is believed to be 1850 per user/per day')
  }
}