I've been trying to run a discourse forum for a few weeks now and have been having an issue: emails sent to gmail addresses (85% of my current membership) are getting thrown in to the spam folder. I've tried telling members to check their spam and consider adding forum@domain to their contacts but it seems that many haven't done this beyond activating their account from within the spam folder...
I first attempted to use Mandrill, as recommended, but thought that maybe Mandrill's default of including an image and tracking links was hurting me -- so I disabled those, no problem. Still in spam. Just switched to Amazon SES thinking that might work better ... still in spam. With both Mandrill and SES I set up SPF and DKIM records which appear to check out -- help!
Here's an activation mail (with headers) that was thrown into gmail's spam:
Delivered-To: [redacted]@gmail.com
Received: by 10.170.190.195 with SMTP id h186csp745744yke;
Thu, 24 Jul 2014 08:26:27 -0700 (PDT)
X-Received: by 10.70.126.35 with SMTP id mv3mr11234202pdb.125.1406215587092;
Thu, 24 Jul 2014 08:26:27 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path: <0000014768fafe74-1ba073ae-4d6d-42f8-a7f5-be248726b2a8-000000@us-west-2.amazonses.com>
Received: from a27-45.smtp-out.us-west-2.amazonses.com (a27-45.smtp-out.us-west-2.amazonses.com. [54.240.27.45])
by mx.google.com with ESMTPS id wk8si6315280pab.59.2014.07.24.08.26.25
for <[redacted]@gmail.com>
(version=TLSv1 cipher=ECDHE-RSA-RC4-SHA bits=128/128);
Thu, 24 Jul 2014 08:26:27 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of 0000014768fafe74-1ba073ae-4d6d-42f8-a7f5-be248726b2a8-000000@us-west-2.amazonses.com designates 54.240.27.45 as permitted sender) client-ip=54.240.27.45;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com;
spf=pass (google.com: domain of 0000014768fafe74-1ba073ae-4d6d-42f8-a7f5-be248726b2a8-000000@us-west-2.amazonses.com designates 54.240.27.45 as permitted sender) smtp.mail=0000014768fafe74-1ba073ae-4d6d-42f8-a7f5-be248726b2a8-000000@us-west-2.amazonses.com;
dkim=pass header.i=@housereddoran.com
DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; q=dns/txt; c=relaxed/simple;
s=ylqphniwqeaveq5ccxkwgu7bosha5tnq; d=housereddoran.com;
t=1406215585;
h=Date:From:Reply-To:To:Message-ID:Subject:Mime-Version:Content-Type:Content-Transfer-Encoding;
bh=7Xtmeof/wuPCLZeqZY9ecrxajs1yp3bnqbRVSVREd0g=;
b=CZsgeYVMbzPoE0sT3v6Dhx7os02YgGhcaXrjonvDJFoKUdqBB3WX7hF9SNTMPU5+
Rurhl0VCLBD2okCXHWssK2nLMYChZo4JdqA5gx+Qax24LbBs5QJ1BhKIAYB7/3B+xQ3
PC5/1K48rLaKJKGTJIOTJurwEIvfkCylqRAyuONo=
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2014 15:26:25 +0000
From: forum@housereddoran.com
Reply-To: forum@housereddoran.com
To: [redacted]@gmail.com
Message-ID: <0000014768fafe74-1ba073ae-4d6d-42f8-a7f5-be248726b2a8-000000@us-west-2.amazonses.com>
Subject: [House Reddoran] Activate your new account
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="--==_mimepart_53d125a0e5076_533fa382b9c340368a7";
charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Auto-Submitted: auto-generated
X-Discourse-Topic-Id:
X-Discourse-Post-Id:
X-Discourse-Reply-Key:
X-SES-Outgoing: 2014.07.24-54.240.27.45
----==_mimepart_53d125a0e5076_533fa382b9c340368a7
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Welcome to House Reddoran!
Click the following link to confirm and activate your new account:
https://forum.housereddoran.com/users/activate-account/4348a64884ab1c80449295787983ddb2
If the above link is not clickable, try copying and pasting it into the address bar of your web browser.
----==_mimepart_53d125a0e5076_533fa382b9c340368a7
Content-Type: text/html;
charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Welcome to House Reddoran!
Click the following link to confirm and activate your new account:
https://forum.housereddoran.com/users/activate-account/4348a64884ab1c80449295787983ddb2
If the above link is not clickable, try copying and pasting it into the address bar of your web browser.
----==_mimepart_53d125a0e5076_533fa382b9c340368a7--
Here's what gmail says about the mail:
Why is this message in Spam? It's similar to messages that were detected by our spam filters.
Help!
