Emails going to junk?

[Gavster]

My personal emails seem to land in the junk folders of people, which incredibly frustrating.

Email is also a bit of a dark art and I have no idea how to address this issue. Has anyone ever heard of an easy service/method to 'clean' my email address?

Considering I don't use that email address for any bullk mailings I'm a little confused as to how this has happened.

[jamcg]

Is it because you send a load of bollocks?

It’s easy to take the piss but it is infuriating. Our work emails often land in junk folders because we have the word ‘sales’ in the email address, nothing funny like that about yours is there?

[Sundayjumper]

IIRC Gavster is a therapist based in Scunthorpe.

[Gavster]

Is it because you send a load of bollocks?

It’s easy to take the piss but it is infuriating. Our work emails often land in junk folders because we have the word ‘sales’ in the email address, nothing funny like that about yours is there?

You might be onto something

I have remembered that the email address is the send from for an inactive mailchimp mailing list. Sent 1 email in the last 4 years. Prior to that, it was sending 1 email a week. However, this problem only seems to manifested in the last 12 months. I've done a handful of cold outreach with it too, maybe 50 to 100 emails in the last 18 months.

[Gavster]

OKay, a test on https://www.mail-tester.com has shown I'm blacklisted on one spam mailing list... trying to get that removed now

[Gavster]

Update 2: going to get someone to setup authentication correctly for my domain, then get my email removed from the blacklist. This should sort it

[Beany]

Update 2: going to get someone to setup authentication correctly for my domain, then get my email removed from the blacklist. This should sort it

Yeah, make sure SPF, DKIM and DMARC are set up - they are pretty much all a requirement these days if you want to send emails from your own domain.
https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/learni ... -dkim-spf/

It's caught a lot of people who run, say, Cpanel on their own servers (or have something hosted by a small company who run their own servers) out.

We have a 'central' mail server with all that guff set up on it, and our client servers relay through it - it's not as 'reliable' as if we were sending through a hosted Google account or similar, but it's close enough and we control it entirely so it's a decent compromise, but the other side of it of course is that we're a tech company, so we know these things.

For the average Joe who just wants to send email from their own domain it's a bit of a faff

[NGRhodes]

If you do any kind of automated forwarding, the servers need to be configured to ensure the spf/dkim/dmarc headers are rewritten and still valid or else will get penalised by spam filters as these headers look like they are from the pre-forwarded email server and not yours.
Clouldflare are good at this, very few smaller (especially shared cpanel) webhosts get this right.

On the flip the state of spam filtering is generally poor (no one's fault, its a giant game of whack-a-mole blocking spammers), so it's no surprise legitimate emails often get marked as spam or even not delivered. Even Microsoft often marks their own emails as spam when using outlook.com

[Gavster]

If you do any kind of automated forwarding, the servers need to be configured to ensure the spf/dkim/dmarc headers are rewritten and still valid or else will get penalised by spam filters as these headers look like they are from the pre-forwarded email server and not yours.
Clouldflare are good at this, very few smaller (especially shared cpanel) webhosts get this right.

On the flip the state of spam filtering is generally poor (no one's fault, its a giant game of whack-a-mole blocking spammers), so it's no surprise legitimate emails often get marked as spam or even not delivered. Even Microsoft often marks their own emails as spam when using outlook.com

Would that mean that if I had a side project domain (sideproject.com) whose emails all automatically forwarded to my main email (gavin@work.com) it would be problematic for gavin@work.com? Beause that's what I've got - I registered a new domain last year and simply set Google domains to forward all emails to my main address. I get a few enquiries through the sideproject email address which I then respond to from my gavin@work.com which is the one I'm having issues with.

On the other hand, we've made improvements in the mail-tester score already by setting up the relevant authentications

[NGRhodes]

Essentially the server where your email resides has to trust the server that is doing the forwarding.
There are a few way to do this with SRS or dmarc enveloping or more simply the server could be added to a list of trusted servers.
Afraid I don't remember anything more specific, but there is plenty of info if you Google SRS and dmarc enveloping.
You can check headers of forwarded emails to see what is going on, but again I can't remember what to look for though without Googling.

[Beany]

If he's using mail-tester, it gives you a unique address to send to, and when it arrives, it tells you all the things that are wrong with it, so that should answer pretty much every question up to the 'how do I set up SPF/DKIM/etc' stage that his tech bloke can do.

It's the bollocks for this sort of stuff

https://www.mail-tester.com/

[NGRhodes]

Not sure how you can test forwarding though as it only tests sending from origin, not via a forwarder.

[Beany]

Not sure how you can test forwarding though as it only tests sending from origin, not via a forwarder.

Ah, a good point. I might have to have a think about that