Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : Is this ok -- host email reply goes to spam?

[techiecool]

i just wanted to understand whether it is ok if you send a presales support email. and the response comes back and ends up in your spam folder. does that have an indication of any sorts of problems with the host and blacklists?

[RDOSTI]

Not really..certain spam filters react differently to good emails...theres always a chance you get stuck in spam no matter how good or genuine your email is (Ask Hotmail & Yahoo Users) lol

Regards

[vnairp11]

you have to mark each email as not spam and i'lll build up a good email database

[techiecool]

i just figured that emailing from one's own email servers would end up in spam if the mail server had been blacklisted. but it could be an overcautious gmail/yahoo spam control in effect also.

[Jedito]

that could be bad if you're hosted on the same server where your host have their site.

[bithost(NET)]

Originally Posted by techiecool

i just wanted to understand whether it is ok if you send a presales support email. and the response comes back and ends up in your spam folder. does that have an indication of any sorts of problems with the host and blacklists?

No.

Remember that a sales message is a sales message, and that your email provider's spam filters are set up to detect sales messages and identify them as spam. It's more a reflection on your email provider's spam filters actually working not a problem with your prospective web host.

Are you going to be sending sales emails to your website viewers? Are your website viewers mostly AOL, Yahoo and Hotmail users? If you are and they are, and you don't want to be running into this problem, I would recommend signing up with an enterprise-class email provider that has all the thousands of dollars' worth of purchased certifications and what-not.

That said, I recently ran (informal) tests between AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail to determine delivery behavior as related to server set-up. I was able to massage server and domain configuration to get friend-to-friend type emails to usually deliver to the inboxes about 1/2 the time at AOL, Gmail and Yahoo; I never hit the inbox in Hotmail. Now if Hotmail will not deliver a friend-type email to the inbox, even wth rDNS, SPF and DomainKeys installed, then what will they deliver to their inboxes?! It's ridiculous.

Free email providers are just a first-class PROBLEM these days......... I know they are popular, but they are extraordinarily overzealous in their spam filtering. This is not a new problem, either; several years ago I ran a forum for MojoMail (mojohelp.com) and people running totally legit, non-spam newsletters were running into these problems with the Big 3 back then, too. They've gotten worse instead of better.

As for blacklists, you can check whether your prospective host's IP is on any of the major blacklists at http://openrbl.org ...... remember that this is only the IP address of your web host's own mail server. If they run multiple servers, and/or have their hosting site on a different network from their client servers, then OpenRBL is not going to show the results for the IP space you would be hosted on.

Hope this helps to explain!!

Bailey

[Annex]

Originally Posted by bithost(NET)

No.

Remember that a sales message is a sales message, and that your email provider's spam filters are set up to detect sales messages and identify them as spam. It's more a reflection on your email provider's spam filters actually working not a problem with your prospective web host.

Are you going to be sending sales emails to your website viewers? Are your website viewers mostly AOL, Yahoo and Hotmail users? If you are and they are, and you don't want to be running into this problem, I would recommend signing up with an enterprise-class email provider that has all the thousands of dollars' worth of purchased certifications and what-not.

That said, I recently ran (informal) tests between AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail to determine delivery behavior as related to server set-up. I was able to massage server and domain configuration to get friend-to-friend type emails to usually deliver to the inboxes about 1/2 the time at AOL, Gmail and Yahoo; I never hit the inbox in Hotmail. Now if Hotmail will not deliver a friend-type email to the inbox, even wth rDNS, SPF and DomainKeys installed, then what will they deliver to their inboxes?! It's ridiculous.

Free email providers are just a first-class PROBLEM these days......... I know they are popular, but they are extraordinarily overzealous in their spam filtering. This is not a new problem, either; several years ago I ran a forum for MojoMail (mojohelp.com) and people running totally legit, non-spam newsletters were running into these problems with the Big 3 back then, too. They've gotten worse instead of better.

As for blacklists, you can check whether your prospective host's IP is on any of the major blacklists at http://openrbl.org ...... remember that this is only the IP address of your web host's own mail server. If they run multiple servers, and/or have their hosting site on a different network from their client servers, then OpenRBL is not going to show the results for the IP space you would be hosted on.

Hope this helps to explain!!

Bailey

To further extend that statement, anything that has multiple URLs is usually shot down by their filters. Your best option is to whitelist the host on your email account. I was once able to get an email to hotmail inbox from a hosting account a few years back, but if I included any URLs, it would pretty much be marked as spam.

[TimothyH]

No. Some of the emails I sent to clients go to there Spam box. I just tell them check the Spam box if they can't find there email. Just don't link the email to your website and it should not get blocked.

As above mosts have said, any URL's and it will more than likely be marked as spam.

[ImageLeet]

No, yahoo and hotmail mail filters are usually on stereoids( in comparison to gmail) and they do sometimes send the legit mails in the spam folder. You would have to mark them in inbox and they will build a database in future.

[TonyB]

Hotmail and Yahoo are absolute headaches when it comes to spam. We got everything setup and yet some of our welcome emails and support emails still get blocked. Absolutely frustrating to deal with considering no matter what you do you still get stuff blocked.

Now in fact I've seen outlook throwing some of our support response emails into its spam folder as well. I think it has to do with simply have web site url's in an email.