Comment on Can a reply to an ongoing email conversation land in spam?

dorkian_gray@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

To expand on what others have said, once you send the email, one of two things might happen:

1.) The receiving email server might report the email as delivered to the recipient, or

2.) Your email might get “bounced”, where the recipient is not notified of the email and the email is returned to you with a notice stating why the email was not delivered.

The second one is what happens if the email server is “sure” your email is spam. But even if the email is marked as delivered, that doesn’t mean it goes in the inbox. Secondary checks determine which box it goes in, and that box might be “Spam”. This secondary process is entirely internal to the mall provider, where the initial checks before delivery usually rely on a SpamAssassin instance.

Both are influenced by a number of factors, but the biggest are DNS (Domain Name Service) records on your domain which show you’re a legitimate sender. These are:

A comprehensive explanation and guide can be found here: dmarcly.com/…/how-to-implement-dmarc-dkim-spf-to-…

But the short of it is that if your SPF or DKIM are wrong or missing, your emails are much more likely to be rejected or to land in spam. You won’t lose points (yet) for not having DMARC, but if you have SPF and DKIM set up correctly it gives about 10% better chance of being delivered (but it may not affect whether you get to the inbox, depending on those secondary checks).

You can use mail-tester.com to check for these and other issues that would stop your emails getting to the inbox. Don’t worry about “reverse DNS” not matching, or if it says you don’t have an “unsubscribe header”. RDNS can’t be expected to match anymore and I don’t think it’s a good spam indicator. Unsubscribe headers are only for mailing list emails, so if you’re not testing a marketing email from somewhere like MailChimp then you won’t have an unsubscribe header. Finally, being on SORBS is not the end of the world, and blacklists generally can be ignored unless your email provider is small, or if you run your own server.

Finally, don’t ever think “it’s been working fine so it shouldn’t stop working now”. SPF and DKIM weren’t necessary five-ish years ago, now they’re mandatory; DMARC itself hasn’t been taken very seriously to date but Microsoft just recently announced they’re actually going to start paying attention to it. On top of standards changing, unless you own and run the email server in your dwelling, you don’t have the control necessary to say “nothing has changed”. Microsoft can and does change their system constantly behind the scenes: applying patches, updates, retiring old servers and configuring new ones into the cluster, and so on. What was is not relevant; you can only look at what is, and fix that.

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