How to prevent emails to members going to spam?

[MBJ86]

Hi, I periodically send out mass email updates to approximately 5k members using the Communication tab in the ACP --> Email Users, but most are reporting that the emails go into their spam/junk folders and they therefore do not see them.

Is there a way around this? Thanks!

 

[Muddy Boots]

Difficult without more info on how your sending your emails and what method but if its your own server or VPS you must make sure the mail side is set up correctly so that email authentication is correct, like SPF and DKIM as this proves your emails and domain belong together, also check your reverse DNS to make sure the IP address of your mail server points to the domain your sending mail from....

If its shared hosting then you need to ask your host - if they are any good they will fix or or report your problems - however if they are not that good they will blame someone or something else....

And for the likes of Hotmail (and some other big players) I gave up as no matter what I did all emails went to spam and they never over the years ever responded to complaints so in the end on my forums I banned the problematic emails (ie hotmail) and warned users with a text box on registration.......

If your sending mail through a private email (like Namecheap's) on SMPT then they take care of the SPF records and so all should be good....

 

[Sim]

Hi, I periodically send out mass email updates to approximately 5k members using the Communication tab in the ACP --> Email Users, but most are reporting that the emails go into their spam/junk folders and they therefore do not see them.

Is there a way around this? Thanks!

This indicates that you have a poor sending reputation with most email providers.

I'm guessing you are sending email using your hosting provider's SMTP service? If it's a shared server - you are going to share the same sending reputation as everyone else on the server, and so if someone else is not doing the right thing, you will suffer too.

I highly recommend using a 3rd party Email Service Provider (Sendgrid, SparkPost, AWS SES, etc) - they are much more reliable for sending emails. However, note that some of these do not allow marketing emails (emails sent to multiple users in bulk) and are for transactional email only.

You also need to ensure you have SPF and DKIM set up to identify who you are to mail providers. Using a 3rd party ESP will make this step easy.

Finally - you need to ensure that your mailing list is clean. If you continue to attempt sending to invalid email addresses, then email providers (Google / Yahoo / Microsoft / etc) will consider you to most likely be a spammer and will block your emails or put them in spam.

It is critically important that you set up bounced email handling in XenForo to prevent repeated attempts to email invalid addresses.