Forum Moderators: phranque
But we don't spam, and have an opt-out at the bottom of all emails. After some users sign up, then decide later they don't want to participate, some will just click the "spam" button on their email service/program instead of unsubscribing. Because of this, after we get a few thousand users, email services/ISPs will start to think we spam.
I'm on a shared server. I cannot afford a dedicated server, and other services such as ConstantContact and Aweber are too expensive for me.
How can I stop the bouncing?
[edited by: phranque at 9:14 am (utc) on April 22, 2009]
[edit reason] hosting specifics [/edit]
Hotmail has a particularly bad reputation for it. I once had a heated conversation with the managing director of a major hosting service about their failure to respond to my problem tickets. To my embarassment it turned out that they had been responding but Hotmail had been refusing to deliver the emails.
The more technically minded will respond with lots of stuff about SPF records but as you have shared hosting you will need to check if this is something that they will let you do.
Life is too short to fiddle with all errors...
For those who receive the "spam" notice, we advise them to contact their ISP to allow our email/newsletters. Everyone who made the effort does get our send. If they don't make the effort I don't worry about them.
If they don't make the effort I don't worry about them.Unfortunately I don't have that luxury as my website is transactional and so it is critical that users get my emails.
"Remote host said: 552 longtime spam source".But we don't spam....
Two immediate possibilities occur, without further investigation.
- You may not be spamming, but someone on that shared box might be. This may be in reaction to the sending IP address.
- How secure are your forms? It's not all that difficult for a spammer to abuse a form in such a way as to add their own BCC field; you get one email, AOL gets 1000. You may say "There's no BCC field in our form processor" - but the deal here is if not properly filtered, a spammer can use your form to modify the mail output headers and add their own BCC field.
I cannot afford a dedicated server
If you're dealing with transactions, you can't afford not to take positive steps to get off shared hosting. Look at VPS/VDS options. You can get into an economy end of this for as little as $39/mo, up to plans for more than you'll likely ever need at $59/mo.
I have one client that used this mantra on me for years, until finally something happened at his shared host that forced him to make a move. He got his own dedicated IP address, his own cert, his own mail server, and complete control over his VPS. The amazement was multifold, all of his problems just went away, everything was faster, and he was no longer at the mercy of shared hosting. Then he asked me "why didn't we do this years ago?" <virtual roll-eyes . . . >
You really need to look at this.
Google "spam blacklist" and run your ip address on those websites to see who has you listed. You can follow directions on those sites on how to get removed.
Blacklisting is not caused by opt in subscribers pressing the "spam" button in their email client. It is generally caused by spamming or by hosting an open relay that allows others to spam. Rocknbill's message details this issue.
Running a small site for a community group I have been through all these issues. Moving email newsletters away from my ISP and onto the hosting service's email server stopped this being a regular issue but it still happens very infrequently (every couple of years rather than every couple of months). At least the hosting company is a lot quicker at doing something about the problem if it occurs.
Some servers may reject mail based on missing fields like From: and Sent: or their missing valid data (domain in from matches the mail server domain). Java based forms seem to leave them out often.
The PHP based form I use has a token in place of the email address in the 'recipient' field. On the server a PHP file uses the token to reference one or more email addresses. Thus there's no usable email address to be scraped in the form's HTML. The PHP file further locks down all sending to only mailboxes in the domains you have specified elsewhere in that file.
One Captcha that I'm thinking of adding to it is a simple math problem. The default radio button is labeled "I'm a spambot". After 3 attempts a new equation is presented.
