Ask HN: GMail blacklisting new domains? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: GMail blacklisting new domains?

8 pointsjoshdotsmith7 comments

Hopefully a Google employee or someone with insight into Gmail's spam algorithms/blacklists can help solve this puzzle.

I'm the founder of Goals.com, and we clearly inherited a very old domain name. Fifteen years old, to be exact. That means we've also inherited an unfortunate legacy of spam.

We've done everything right in handling this. We use SendGrid for our transactional emails, have set up white labeling to use DKIM, SPF, etc. And we've even made a point on user sign up of checking the spam folders/filters. We have close to 99% reputation, provide unsubscribe links or a link to email management, and try to make sure our emails don't read spammy.

Someone at SendGrid has been helping me out with this (Kyle – thanks, dude!), and his efforts have been great but futile. We finally buckled and registered a new domain, only to find that those emails, too, were being blacklisted. Kyle helped us out again, and again even the most basic, least spammy test emails were going straight to spam.

I was told that Google has no procedure for fixing this problem, that we are blacklisted with no option but to use '@sendgrid.com' for our emails. This could be fairly confusing to our users, so obviously I want to avoid this if at all possible.

Does anyone know how or why Google has been blacklisting domains (even new ones), or know how to fix such a problem?

My company was in a similar boat with a decade plus old domain (though I don't think it ever had anything scummy associated with it before we bought it). When we first started testing our site in January '09, our "click here to verify your email address" emails were going to spam, and it was a major bummer. After a week of calling ~100 of our friends with @gmail accounts to sign up and mark the email as not spam, our messages finally started going through.

I have no idea if that's a normal sample size, nor any proof that that's what made the difference. Regardless, I strongly believe that having lots of people go to their spam folder and mark you as not spam has a huge effect; if I was designing a spam filter I'd definitely weight that feedback heavily. If you can somehow build that into your app (i.e. make people verify their email to continue), in the long term it should solve your problem. In the short term, your UX will be a little worse and you'll be constantly wondering how long it's going to take until google trusts you. Welcome to the nightmare that is email deliverability!

I'm not a Google guy, but I've had some experience setting up new domains for email. You have nothing but my best wishes. Its a pain in the ass. Sounds like you've checked a lot, but in case you haven't, check to see if your IP(s) are on spamhaus and other blacklists.

Yeah, I've checked that, unfortunately. We're not listed, and the new domain certainly wouldn't be.

Proabably not the domain but the IP? Have you checked the headers?

The IP is SendGrid's, so that's not the issue. The variable that causes it go to spam is unfortunately the domain.

You need to add a DNS record authenticating sendgrid as a legitimate host to send mail for your domain.

Don't remember the exact details, since it differs depending on which spam-fighting protocol you're dealing with.

I did that. They have you add an A record, three separate TXT records, and a CNAME.

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