For a long time activation emails sent to Gmails users have been marked as spam. I thought it was because there is a link in it, and before I was using the word “congratulations” which is probably not very popular by spam filtering software. Now I think I’ve finally figured out the real reason, yay!
I’m using SPF on Blinkenshell’s DNS to stop spam with from addresses using @blinkenshell.org, what this does is make sure that only specific hosts can send emails using blinkenshell.org as the domain in the from address. The problem was, in the DNS editing software I had just entered a SPF record like this:
v=spf1 a mx -all
This worked for me last time I used SPF, but this software was different. When I checked the SPF record today I noticed I got a reply looking like this:
"v=spf1" "a" "mx" "-all"
Some SPF checking software doesn’t like this, because they expect it to be in one string, like this:
"v=spf1 a mx -all"
So I enclosed the string in quotes in the DNS software and now it seems to work much better, gmail doesn’t mark the email as spam even though there is a link in it!
Hopefully this will help a lot, cause many of our users seem to use Gmail and often has often got lost in the past. From now on, I hope that these emails will get through properly! Yay 🙂
