Hi All,

 

I have to go through a standard screening process with conference speakers in order to clear their slides for release to delegates and the 'permissions/copyright' emails are identical except for the attached file. In the past, a number have bounced back flagged as spam. I only ever send to one addressee at a time but they can be anything from hotmail to corporate addresses. There is no pattern to the bouncebacks that I can see.

 

The client is now wanting to upscale the operation so I am looking at how I can minimise the administrative pain. Would transferring the site and its associated email to either a virtual or dedicated server lessen the likelihood that my legitimate (if rather dull) emails get flagged as spam? Or does this have nothing to do with it?

 

At the moment, the email is being sent from a URL on a shared server. The host is Heart.

 

Just hoping that someone can shed a little light on what might be going on. I couldn't find anything similar in the forums.

 

Cheers,

Moomintroll

Hi Moomintroll,

 

You can check if your mail server IP address is blacklisted using http://mxtoolbox.com/ This can also tell you if you have your SPF records set up correctly. If the IP is blacklisted then Heart should be able to sort this out by stopping the spamming client/s and getting the block lifted.

 

A VPS or dedicated server may help you, however blacklists often blacklist 'blocks' of IPs so if another VPS is spamming on the same range as you it can also affect you. Also a VPS or dedicated server can take a lot of effort and you have everything on one box so in the event of failure you can lose everything.

 

Alternatively you could look at using a third party email provider like Microsoft Office 365.

 

Let us know if we can help any further and good luck in resolving your sending issues.

 

All the best

Chris

Chris, thank you for the tip. This is what MXToolbox had to say. Looks like there might be a couple of problems with dmarc and spf records.

 

Well I think it's best to go with virtual or dedicated one's for the sake of best security.

Hey, I have two VPS machines that handles emails for my company and my clients. From my experience if you want to avoid getting blocked in spam filters go with a established email service like Mandrill, Gmail, Outlook360,etc.

 

On Topic: Going with dedicated or VPS it's not very important, either one is good just make sure there are no other mail servers that are sending spam within the same IP range. Also, going with a custom email server will increase your headaches because you first have to setup all this things like SPF, DMARK, etc and your emails will still get blocked until your IP builds up some trust. For example, hotmail will block you by default and you have to mail them to whitelist your server IP.

 

PS. I used mailinbox to setup my email servers.

I realize that a few months have passed since the original question, but maybe this answer can help others.

 

I recommend using Amazon SES with your hosting in order to deliver e-mails without the fear of them getting classified as spam. It is quite a good way to use marketing e-mails and it is pretty cheap also. I think around 1$ per 10.000 e-mails.

 

That would avoid some unpleasant spam markers attached to your e-mails by default just by the sheer volume of it.