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Comment by driaug | Hacker News Reader

It is very hard to make statements about this. It very much depends on the reputation of your own domain (if you are not using our domain to send your emails) and the content of your emails if they will end up in spam. I have yet to see one of my own emails origination from @useplunk.com end up in somebody's spam folder! I believe that is a great start and further down the line (with more data) I may be able to make specific claims about it!

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It sounds like the free version sends emails from the useplunk.com domain. If that is the case and some of those emails get marked as spam, won't all emails from the useplunk.com domain be more likely to be identified as spam?

I have built-in an automatic catch, if x% (still looking at what a good value for x is) of your emails bounce then your account gets quarantined and we see what we can do about that. That way we can prevent damage before other users get affected.

Does that make sense?

Bounce is different than spam. Are you DMARC monitoring?

Sorry about the confusing wording, with bounce I mean both hard bounces, rejects and complaints (they are all monitored appropriately). They are all taken into account when calculating the % because they all have impact on the domain reputation.

But how do you know a message lands in the SPAM folder in Google?

I believe email clients send back a rejection if it landed in spam. It is one of the metrics AWS SES can track for you.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/monitor-sending-ac...

Not quite. If a user actively reports a message as spam and also tells their service provider to report it to the sending service provider, then the sender will receive a report per RFC 6449: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback_loop_(email) , https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6449. That's what SES exposes.

If you get more than a tiny handful of these, shut the account down. Whatever the reason, users don't want the messages and it'll destroy your deliverability quickly. Assuming the sender is legit, they need to figure out why users don't like the messages.

However, the much more common case is that a recipient's mail provider categorizes a message as spam on its own, without any user involvement. That's what parent commenters are referring to.

That can be for any reason. Maybe the user has reported similar past messages as spam. OTOH, maybe other users at the recipient service have had low engagement with messages from the same sender. Or maybe there was a sudden increase in sending volume from a given netblock or domain.

Emails that the receiving system categorizes as spam do not trigger any notification to the sender. Other than by trying to deliver messages to canary accounts or waiting for customer complaints, you won't know this is happening.

Do not use your own corporate domain for user generated content.

Source: been there, done that ... there is no benefit to it and only pain.

Have a separate plunk-emails.com domain that is used for all emails. Or even have a bunch set up and rotate through them. This will mitigate spam impact too -- you will get spam issues even with 100% legit users

Guessing you've already done it, but I worked on something loosely related to this a couple years back and best things you can do to avoid it are:

1. Make sure you've done DKIM and SPF verification via your SMTP provider.

2. Use an SMTP provider with a solid sender reputation (e.g., Postmark).

3. Help users keep lists clean. Aggressively handle bounces and make sure unsubscribe is easy to avoid spam complaints.

P.S. Dig the design/feel of everything. No immediate use but I've bookmarked to come back and give it a try when I do.

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