I just bought a custom domain that I'm trying to use as my primary email address. However at the moment many of my emails are landing in people's SPAM accounts. Are there any cheap ways around this problem (no-spam lists at internet providers or that sort of thing)? I'm not a spammer, I'm a fourth year college student.
Emails from Custom Domain Going to Spam – Solutions
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Related Solutions
As long as you bounce the mail by refusing to receive it in the first place, then a spammer cannot use you to annoy somebody innocent with a lot of bounces.
You can either return an error on the RCPT TO
command, which is what usually happens in case of a non-existent address, or you can return success on the RCPT TO
command but return an error at the end of DATA
.
In both cases, the end result will be the same. Your mail server took no responsibility for the mail, and the sending mail server is now responsible for bouncing it. In case of spam, it means the spammer will have to generate bounces. (And if that's what they wanted to do, they could have done so without even trying to deliver the mail to you in the first place.)
I see no problem in this approach.
I do however see a problem in accepting the mail. I.e. if your mail server responds with success all the way through the transaction including at the end of DATA
, then it becomes the responsibility of your mail server to deliver the mail. This is a problem, because you have no proper way out.
- Silently dropping the mail is a problem, because if any legitimate mail was sent, the sender can never know that it wasn't delivered.
- Sending bounces from your mail server is a problem, because in that case spam bounces to some innocent person's mailbox instead of back to the spammer.
There may be cases where distribution of the email-address in the first place was so limited, that you know there couldn't be any legitimate mail send to the address. In those cases it makes little difference if you reject the RCPT TO
command or if you accept the mail and silently drop it. But I cannot come up with a situation in which silently dropping the mail is better than rejecting it during the SMTP transaction.
Have you checked if users don't actually spam ?
I encountered a similar problem and it was user-related, not actually technical.
After enforcing an antivirus policy, there wes no more spamlisting.
Best Answer
There are a few ways to approach this, none with 100% certainty, but if you try several you'll at least improve your delivery rate. I'm going to assume you have control of DNS for your domain. This is not an exhaustive list.
The last part is just to send "good-looking" email, and this is going to vary a lot depending on how you're creating your messages (in a webapp or in your own desktop client). Docunext's answer is an example of how to approach that problem. This includes things like having the reply-to and from headers match, not using blank subject lines, etc.