Google Apps' mail marked as spam by Gmail?
Recently I found out that mail I sent from this domain (poromenos.org) was being flagged as spam by Gmail. That is odd, because I have (correctly, I believe) defined the SPF records for this domain and it should be recognised as legitimate. I researched a bit, and came to a conclusion that other users have come to as well:
Gmail flags as spam Google Apps emails coming from Google’s SMTP server. I set up a new account and sent emails from Thunderbird and from Google Apps’ web interface, and surely enough, the Thunderbird one got marked as spam. This is a very serious issue, because Gmail users (and perhaps others) don’t receive my mail.
Please comment if it has happened to you or if you think I am doing something wrong. Perhaps I need to add an SPF record for every IP I send mail from? That’s unreasonable and very impractical, since my connection has a dynamic IP.
If you have a Google Apps domain, I urge to you do this test to find out if your messages are marked as spam. Send mail to a Gmail user who doesn’t have you in their contact list (otherwise your message will pass) and see which gets marked as spam and which doesn’t. I would also appreciate it if you would leave comments detailing the results of this test.
UPDATE: Well, I confirmed that my SPF settings are correct (Gmail tells you in “View original message”), but the exact same message sometimes gets classified as spam and sometimes as ham. I don’t know what’s going on, if anyone has any idea please leave a comment.
UPDATE 2: The SPF line (TXT DNS record) I added to my domain to make this work is v=spf1 a mx a:google.com include:aspmx.googlemail.com ~all, which is a bit different than what Google says. It seems to work fine now.
Yikes, I just found out my mail is also doing this! No wonder I'm not getting any replies from clients!
I'm seriously irritated with google because of this.
Thanks for your input on the matter. I'll try your "Update 2" method to see if it solves my problem.
Thx,
Andre
Submitted by Andre (not verified) on Mon, 12/01/2009 - 20:39.Well, I just found out from my users that notifications of private messages sent from my SMF forum end up in spam.
I've just altered my DNS settings according to your Update 2, and will see if that would do the trick. Thanks.
Submitted by X3mE (not verified) on Mon, 06/07/2009 - 13:45.HI,
I too have the same problem. My users are not receiving the mail because it goes to the spam list. I don't know what to do? How to add the SPF settings? Please help me to do that.
Thanks,
Submitted by Krishna (not verified) on Thu, 12/11/2009 - 07:50.Krishna
the spf above didn't work for me, by defining this in your domain manager as a
TXTrecord it should be able to fix your problem:v=spf1 mx a ptr a:google.com a:googlemail.com a:gmail.com include:aspmx.googlemail.com mx:aspmx.l.google.com mx:alt1.aspmx.l.google.com mx:alt2.aspmx.l.google.com mx:aspmx2.googlemail.com ~allgmail smtp is sent using smtp.gmail.com so I thought if I added gmail.com (or any of those tld google uses for mail for that matter) in the spf it should fix the problem and it did!
I made this using http://wizard.easyspf.com/ you can customize your own spf for your domain, hope this helps :)
for more about spf: http://www.openspf.org/
Submitted by atanation (not verified) on Wed, 18/11/2009 - 18:06.Ah, thanks for that, although I've tested mine with the SPF checkers and it worked. I don't think you need to list all the MX servers explicitly as this is what the "mx" field does... I'm glad it worked for you, though!
Submitted by Stavros on Wed, 18/11/2009 - 18:09.