How to overcome issue of User Activation Emails treated as Spams by Gmail?

I

iEagle

New member
Hi All,

In the midst of setting up my forum and has been doing a fair bit of testing lately and realize that all my User Activation emails and system generated emails from the forum has been treated as Spam mails by Gmail.

Could I seek advice on how to overcome this issue?

Thanks.

JM
 
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Send from a well known domain which has sent email before, setup DKIM and setup SPF.

The first part is the sticker, but make sure you do the last two.
 
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What's SVF?

Also reverse DNS is a tricky buggar. I've been banging on my host to get this issue fixed for me. Not sure why it's so difficult to fix.

I have problems with emails from the forum going to yahoo, hotmail (any Microsoft), AOL, gmail, all of them. I've resorted to modifying the phrases on my registrations pages & creating guides for how to add to whitelists, safe senders lists, creating filters, etc

This is partially a systematic problem due to increased spamming and thus increased anti spammer tools. One of those is treating formatted HTML messages with links as suspect.
 
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My main issue was on Gmail. Tested on Yahoo and all the system generated mails including the Activation mails went through.

On Gmail, nothing passed their huge golden gate......not even my welcome emails.....:(
 
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I'm still confused. So are you saying that the default unsubscribe links are not conforming because...? I'm pretty sure I understand what you mean, I don't think they do 'conform' to the "letter of the law" in all cases but that is typically the rule for mass mailing lists and newletters, not a forum alert, or at least, I thought.

I think what you are saying is that there has to be a global "unsubscribe" link of some kind in order to comply, one that doesn't just take you to a page on your logged-in account. But this is not XF specific, I get alerts from other forum engines that are just as non-compliant.
 
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Floyd R Turbo said:
I'm still confused. So are you saying that the default unsubscribe links are not conforming because...? I'm pretty sure I understand what you mean, I don't think they do 'conform' to the "letter of the law" in all cases but that is typically the rule for mass mailing lists and newletters, not a forum alert, or at least, I thought.
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Not conforming is probably too strong a term. But most de-listing procedures technically require any 'unsubscribe page' should easily allow delisting. Finding and then issuing a password reset, so you can login to delist isn't exactly easy.

I think what you are saying is that there has to be a global "unsubscribe" link of some kind in order to comply, one that doesn't just take you to a page on your logged-in account. But this is not XF specific, I get alerts from other forum engines that are just as non-compliant.
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The pseudo-standard 'list-unsubscribe' header basically requires the system to handle unsubscribing without a username/password login. Especially when it works by firing off an email in response. While the standard supports a HTTPS url, not all providers support it.
 
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I think the opt-out link discussion is somewhat independent of the original issue (which is likely more down to domain reputation, SPF, etc), but the opt-out links from automated XF emails (like thread subscriptions) don't require you to login.
 
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Good to know, thanks Mike

One thing the OP can also check on @iEagle is here: http://mxtoolbox.com/ then enter your domain and click the MX Lookup button, then once it loads click SMTP Test.

Currently I have 2 domains on dedicated IPs that both have SMTP Valid Hostname = Reverse DNS is not a valid Hostname and 2 domains on non-dedicated IPs with SMTP Banner Check = Reverse DNS does not match SMTP Banner.

The former two are ones that run my forum and my business email which is related to the forum topic, so that sucks for me on both avenues. Apparently when they switched dedicated IPs they forgot to adjust the rDNS and that totally screwed everything up for months until I caught the issue. Since then, it's been just a matter of total slacker support staff issues, but I know the guy and he's been giving me a pretty decent deal so I have been giving him a pass...but that pass is about ready to get shredded.

So it used to be a lot worse...but I'm not sure how the current errors affect deliverability now vs "damage done" type of thing (bad reputation or something). Meaning, if I get it fixed, will that issue just completely disappear or what.

Then, we won't talk about GoDaddy and their Relay server which delays all mail for 4-5 minutes and then makes it virtually impossible to resolve any of the mxtoolbox issues.
 
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Xon's tip above about setting up DKIM/SPF is excellent advice, but even with that we've still had problems.

So I posted a thread about such on our board (See Issues with Gmail registrations...) explaining exactly where to look for the email, as well as how to add our sending email address into their contacts.

Then I also edited the XenForo Phrase your_account_is_currently_awaiting_confirmation_confirmation_sent_to_x to direct Gmail users to that thread.

While it's not perfect, for us it's worked out pretty well.(y)
 
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