I was running an Immunity Challenge on my site and got 7.000 people signing up within a week. We had pretty soon delivery issues with messages going into SPAM on Gmail, and things were better after reducing the speed of sending emails. After a few days we had increasing problems with Hotmail which seems to be notorious for sending messages to SPAM.
I started to mail out on a weekly basis to my list, and after 3 months I suddenly have increasingly problems with Gmail again. Testing with https://www.gmass.co/ I see that the majority of messages goes to SPAM, which did not happen 3 weeks ago. Sending from a different Email address that has a list of 1200 subscribers, I have no SPAM problems at all. When I use https://www.mail-tester.com/ it tells me that the SpamAssasin score is bad, especially in relation to Razor:
Razor2 gives confidence level above 50% cf: 100
Listed in Razor2 (http://razor.sf.net/)
I am kind of stunned and wonder what I can do about that problem. I have proper setup of SPF, DKIM and DMARC and using Amazon SES for sending. All properly set up. Any hint what I could do will be welcome.
Do you have your ptr record, aka your reverse DNS, this could cause deliverability issue if not set up properly. I don’t use Amazon SES, I run my own mail servers, so, if I am sending large emails, I do ip rotation, this way, you won’t have to worry when one IP gets blacklisted.
Have you tried warming up the list though? You might be sending too fast, so, you can either throttle the sending limit or use IP rotation.
In my case that I am sending via Amazon SES, the IPs they use for sending will point to Amazon, right? Is there any PTR record that I need to set up on my server?
Yes I have heard about IP warming, but since I use shared IPs from Amazon SES, the IPs should be warmed. Do I need to warm up a domain or Email address as well? In my case I got 7000 contacts signing up within a week shall I reject to send them emails? And why does this program aggravate after sending for 3 months every week? Still many questions, but you have probably more experience than I do. Maybe you can help me clarify some of those issues.
Honestly, your best bet is to contact Amazon SES support as to why your emails are going to spam. As for IP warming, you don’t need to warm up domain or Email address as they are connected together anyway. I don’t know if amazon supports adding multiple IP, but even if they support this feature, and you send spam emails, major email servers can block the entire range of the IP’s without a blink, rendering it useless.
So, I’ll suggest you fix the underlying issue, contact them for support.
devsrealm said it perfectly, I would add the followings as next steps:
You can set a PTR only if you have control over the IP. Amazon won’t allow you that, but they will give you warmed up domains already.
Amazon SES also rotates your emails as a default, you don’t have to worry about it. And they will give you an IP with health over 100%
As of settings all you need is SPF, DMARC and DKIM.
If your spamassassin score is bad, you can check your blackisted status here: https://mxtoolbox.com/ (Dropdown Blacklist Check)
Apply it for the sending domain (where your Mautic is) and Email address domain as well.
What is your total score in mail-tester?
For self-help you can use glockapps.com, they will give you a bunch of tools how to monitor and help you to inbox. (No affiliation.)
When deliverability suddenly drops is usually one of the followings:
you sent out an email, that spamboxed due to bad settings / content or super low response rate
you introduced a new domain as sender email registered less than 15 days ago (Spameatingmonkey pulls down your score)
you send too fast or too much email, and broke your pattern. This is only if you send more than 500 / day to Gmail, let’s say you go up from 500 to 5000.
I was running an email that asked subscribers to respond and from the 8000 contacts I got 150 responses. That was eliminating the razor listing for the next email, but in the meantime razor is back. GMail is though landing in the Inbox again. I got 5000 of the 8000 contacts on Gmail. My open rates are normally between 10% and 25%. My last email got on Mail Tester a total score of 6, because Spamassin is giving -4 in result of razor.
Razor is very picky about spamtraps. I think you should clean your list once and see what happens.
There are a bunch of services who can do that. It’s not a big list, it makes sense.
The signups of the contacts happened between April and now so they are rather fresh contacts. You think somebody could have signed up already with a spamtrap email? I had about 300 emails that bounced and were removed from the list. Is it possible that somebody has misspelled their address but instead of bouncing it goes to a spamtrap?
Unlikely to get a spamtrap this way.
Bounces can influence your reputaion.
If you want to be sure clean your list with emailoversight / zerobounce, etc.
I did a check via debounce.com and found about 200 contacts with obvious misspelling (like gmai.com or hotmil.com), but that for some reason did not bounce in Amazon SES. It is a mystery to me why they did not cause any bounce, that I still need to figure out. Because I have bounce handling configured correctly and it is working for other addresses. Spamtrap I did not find a single one, but could those addresses have caused me that kind of problems?
Yes, some of those domains are registered, and theoretically somebody could use them in any evil way if they are not bouncing the messages. But 20203641gmail.com is not registered and did not cause a bounce. So either Amazon SES did not create a bounce, or Mautic did not receive it. I just went into Amazon SES and looked at the statistics. The last time I have sent to the full list it produced a 4% bounce rate, so Amazon SES did receive the bounce, but somehow it did not arrive at Mautic. So I have a problem somewhere with bounce handling. Considering that I have 350 emails that were correctly identified as bouncing, but 450 that were not, this is slightly disturbing. Not sure, what can I do to troubleshoot bounce handling?
After reading your discussion here, I created some test contacts with non existing email addresses.
On my email server, i created a bounce mailbox (bounces@domain.tld) and the fake address with joke@domain.tld
In the email settings I set the bounce return path to the bounce@domain.tld address and also set the inbox with login credentials further down at the bounce mailbox settings.
i don’t get any bounces or messages into that mailbox, and mautic keeps sending the welcome message to that fake address. resulting in a lot of alerts.
