Using SendGrid through Azure (free version).
I recently disabled a user's email because it was receiving way too much SPAM. Prior to doing this my activities list was about 1-2 pages long with recognizable e-mails my system was sending out per customer input in a website (there is a workflow for forms which the user inputs, then my system sends out an e-mail confirming input).
Now that I have disabled that e-mail, I am seeing upwards of 59 pages of activity just for one day (since I disabled the e-mail address), most of which is listed as "Deferred" or "Processed". The lists include SPAM e-mail addresses (something-reverse-mortgage#whatever.net, etc.).
Reading the SendGrid documentation, it seems that "Deferred" activities just mean that the receiving ISP is asking SendGrid to slow down. I take this to mean that my server is sending these e-mails.
This is worrisome obviously. Disabling that e-mail has this unintended consequence of seeing hundreds of "Defered" activity listings in SendGrid.
I am confused, however, if this is just the system getting these e-mails and then trying to bounce them back through my server. Since it's SPAM and likely not a real e-mail address, is SendGrid just trying to return the e-mails? Hence the activity?
If so, is this something that will eventually die down, or should I do something to prevent SendGrid from returning these obviously bogus SPAM e-mails to what it thinks is the originating sender?
Thanks in advance.
I send about 100K emails a month with sendgrid and I don't worry at all about deferred. About 1/3 of my outgoing emails are gmail and gmail is very agressive at blocking emails when you send more than 50 or so at once. They simply reject and sendgrid tries again later. They all seem to go thru within about 24 hours.
Related
I've just set up SendGrid, authentificated my domain and did the sender verification.
I use Node.js to send email via the API.
When I make a test, the mail is sent to my outlook address. It takes 3 seconds to appear in Outlook, not in spam, in my inbox.
However, when I make the same test, 30 seconds later, the mail is processed by SendGrid, but I never receive in Outlook..
How can it be possible ?
please check your sendgrid activity tab. Processed doesnt mean that outlook received it. After processed there is another level of delivered. Does it say in your sendgrid activity log that it was delivered. It might say not and outlook refused it because they think one email after the other might be spam. (Keep this in mind when sendgrid sends emails it doesnt come from your email address, and some might mark that as spam)
I messed up something on my code and made my server send 10k+ emails to my own email address last night.
After receiving ~8k this morning, I barely haven't received any mail in the last 8 hours besides sometimes one of the automated ones at a rate of ~10/hour.
Has anyone already experienced this?
I haven't found how to tell gmail about this. Nowhere I have a message saying "your mailbox is slowed down because of abusing use" or something.
Can anyone help or should I wait and go on vacation for a few days?
Edit:
Thanks for the help. To add more details:
Those emails have been sent from a non-gmail SMTP server, say example.com to me#example.com, which I automatically redirect to myaddress#gmail.com.
I thought at first that the problem was coming from the example.com mail server, but it happens this parts works very well for sending and receiving for any other email#example.com.
My emails sent from myaddress#gmail.com are also sent. It is only to receive a mail in myaddress#gmail.com inbox that it won't work.
This makes me guess that this is not a SPAM-filtering issue, since sending works fine.
Edit2:
#bearacuda13, there ain't much code to show. The sequence of failures are:
A delayed_job that calls itself recursively every hour, silently increasing the number of jobs in the database, without any error
A heroku API sunset that starts to make them fail all at once.
An exception mailer to tell me about the exception raised
Done :)
Try https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx to see if you've been added to a blacklist. If you have, it's a serious pain to get off of those lists.
When you send mail, it gets routed through several areas on the internet before winding up in your gmail. Any of those routes has the possibility to flag and blacklist emails from someone they think is a spammer. If you're sending 10k emails in an hour, you've probably triggered the "spammer" criteria.
To get off the lists, you need to contact the organization that has blacklisted you. It might be easier to get a new static IP or domain name.
So the solution has been to wait. In 24 hours I still had not received them all, but at got some message:
which made me feel like messages were on their way.
48 hours later, I now have the feeling I caught up with all my emails.
If this occurs to you, be patient!
we sell software licenses but our emails end in the gmail Promotions tab of the main Inbox or even in the spam folder. During the purchase process we send one email with login details, another email with a link to download the invoice and finally another email with an attachment containing the license. Also on every new release, more or less every six months, we send an email notifying users about free upgrade to the new version. We have some complains from gmail users about not having received the license because they didn't notice the email was classified as a promotion or spam. All emails come dkim signed, from spf authorized servers, we are even on the main postmaster feedback loops and in several dns whitelists.
Is there any way to have gmail correctly classify this emails ?
I am not expert on bulk emails. My suggestions are based as my experiences as active Gmail consumer and experiences with learning algorithms
(1) Avoid being labeled spam:
Request/Advice users to add your Id into their contact list.
Follow the GMail Bulk Mail Guidelines link.
Apart from DKIM/SPF do you handle abuse, unsubscribe emails?
If a user marks you spam, nobody can help. Your emails are annoying to user and Gmail will honor user's preference.
(2) Make it to Primary Tab in Gmail Inbox:
Categories in the INBOX are filtered based on Gmail learning algorithm about user preference.
Play with keywords in your mail. If Gmail identifies email content to be important, they'll put it in Primary. I noticed emails from Godaddy.com with expiration/renewal/promo/profile complete request etc always make it to my Primary tab. Either they have figured it out or could be I have replied to them couple of time. Or I may have spend above threshold time staring at content of their emails.
You may request user to mark Star and Important. GMail learning algorithm should pick it.
Usually nobody replies emails in Promotion and Social tabs. Have your user reply your email. Not the best idea I know.
Noticed another ‘major’ retails emails practice :
For Order confirmation they used retailer#accounts.retailer.com : GMail classified Primary
For Reminders, Upgrade and feedback they used retailer#value.retailer.com : GMail classified Promotions
For Pure promotion they have yet another email ID dealnews#promo.retailer.com : GMail classified Promotions
If user is really annoyed with hundreds of promo email, GMAIL learning algorithm may classify promos to go into spam first than value emails. Three ID strategy seems promising.
Good luck !
I wrote a small Google Apps Script to send out personalized e-mails (conference invitations) individually to recipients (i.e. one recipient per e-mail). As a workaround to the issue of e-mails sent using GmailApp.sendEmail not showing up in the Sent Mail folder, I have one script send the e-mails to itself (i.e. the sender and recipient are the same), then another script to forward those to the appropriate recipients. There are only about 100 (maybe less) verified recipients, but I'm concerned that sending out the e-mails as fast as the script executes might get them flagged as spam due to the rate at which they are being sent. My questions are the following:
If a Google Apps Script accesses a Gmail account to send and forward e-mails using GmailApp, does it incur a sending rate limit (e.g. in e-mails/second, kB/second, etc.)?
Which quota applies to said script? Is it Gmail's 500/day or Google Apps' 100/day?
P.S. I found this discussion about quotas, but I'm not sure if my case falls under either of the scenarios described therein.
There are no such limits. There is a limit on the body size per email - 20KB
It's 500 emails/day for Gmail users and free Google Apps users. Please note though that CCing and BCCing are all counted against your quota. So if you send one email and CC it to 500 hundred people you would have used up all your quota for that day. Also, there are additional quotas when sending emails within a domain.
Also, the method MailApp.getRemainingDailyQuota() will tell you how many more emails you can send that day.
All the quotas are described here:
https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/services/quotas
How are e-mails sent using GmailApp.sendEmail not showing up in the Sent Mail folder?
I have a site on a dedicated server with it's own IP range that has been running for a good few years. We have a notification email address (mailout#domain.com) which we use to send automated emails (activation emails when a user signs up and notification emails if something relevant to them happens, eg someone befriends them or comments on their picture etc). Users can select whether to receive these notifications or not. We have SPF and RDNS setup.
Email from all our other email accounts go to hotmail/gmail/yahoo mail etc correctly into the inbox. However any mail sent from the mailout#domain.com account (whether automatically by the server or manually via outlook) is delivered correctly to the inboxes for yahoo and gmail however goes into Junk in Hotmail (but other #domain.com addresses deliver to hotmail's inbox correctly). It says at the top of the message that MS Smartscreen marked this message as junk. I signed up for MS Smart Network Data Services to monitor the IP and it says it's not blocked but it displays Bot-like behaviour (which kind of makes sense as our notifications are kind of bot like even though they're not spam).
I can't work out what to do to prevent this from happening, we've authenticated the email, there's obviously not a general block on the IP as emails from different accounts on the same domain are going through successfully. It doesn't seem to be the format of the email either because if I send identical emails from mailout#domain.com and contact#domain then the one from contact# gets through to the inbox but the one from mailout# goes through to junk.
I can't really work out what to do and obviously trying to get MS to sort it out is never going to happen and i've used all their available tools. I can obviously try setting up a new email address (eg noreply#domain.com) and using that for notifications but i assume it will only be a matter of time before that gets blocked as well.
I would be immensely grateful for any suggestions anyone has!
Thanks so much,
Dave
You don't have many options. Try to do as many of the following as you can:
Reach out to MS support (don't discard this notion)
Implement DKIM and possibly DMARC (which are vastly more informative than SPF)
Change your IP address to something cleaner
Find and follow bulk sender best practices, e.g. M³AAWG's BCPs, perhaps the Help – I'm on a Blocklist doc