Emails being blocked by mainstream providers

  • Resolved Patrick-Adapt

    (@patrick-adapt)


    8 years, 10 months ago

    Hi,

    I’m currently using this plugin on 3 of my client’s websites and up until recently (past month or so) everything has been working fine.

    However around a month or two ago we started facing problems with the admin emails not being received into my client’s Gmail accounts.

    I’m fortunately a web developer and was able to debug the problem as being caused by a ridiculously high X-Spam-score of 50 (5.0)! I was able to reduce this to 1.3 by changing the Content-type of the email back to plain text but still the emails don’t show in Gmail.

    I also tried setting up a new email account with Hotmail to see if the problem lied solely with Gmail but alas, no email was received in Hotmail either.

    I wondered if you’d encountered this problem before and/or if you had any solutions for this kind of issue?

    My client is getting rather stressed now and I realise that’s not your problem by any amount but nevertheless I would really appreciate a quick response!

    I look forward to hearing from you!

    Best,
    Patrick

    https://wordpress.org/plugins/restaurant-reservations/

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)
  • Jason Hendriks

    (@jasonhendriks)

    8 years, 10 months ago

    I was able to reduce this to 1.3 by changing the Content-type of the email back to plain text but still the emails don’t show in Gmail.

    Thank god it’s not as easy as that to spam, or all the spammers would be doing it!

    I can help you with this. But we need to clarify something:

    we started facing problems with the admin emails not being received into my client’s Gmail accounts.

    able to debug the problem as being caused by a ridiculously high X-Spam-score of 50 (5.0)!

    These statements contradict each other. If you didn’t receive the email, then you can’t tell Google’s spam score. If the email is in your Gmail Spam folder, than your client’s account is receiving the email.

    So here’s what I think is going on:

    • You are using the Gmail SMTP server to send email, but your From address is a custom domain with either a missing or invalid SPF record (an SPF violation)
    • You’re not using the Gmail SMTP server to send email, but your From address is Gmail (an SPF violation)
    • Your are using the Gmail SMTP server, but SMTP authentication is failing, and Restaurant Reservations is hiding the SMTP error – the clue here was “and up until recently”

    The first one you can solve by creating an SPF record for your domain. The second and third you can solve by using this SMTP plugin : https://wordpress.org/plugins/postman-smtp/

    Cheers!
    Jason

    Thread Starter Patrick-Adapt

    (@patrick-adapt)

    8 years, 10 months ago

    Hi Jason,

    First of all – WOW! What a quick response! Thanks so much for getting back to me so quickly.

    Sorry, in such a long message I forgot to mention I managed to discover the spam score (as you’ve quite rightly mentioned didn’t make sense) by setting the plugin to send it’s emails to my work email (…@patrickdanielkelly.co.uk) and then in Thunderbird I was able to view the source, blahh blahh blahh.

    I can confirm I’m not using Gmail as my SMTP. It’s just from the hosting server – which unfortunately due to a staff shortage in their tech department I can’t get access to at the moment.

    My From address is the default which WordPress sites send from. It wasn’t previously but I read up that this was a violation of some sort so changed it back to default.

    Hopefully you can come back to me just as quickly and continue to help me fix this problem! 🙂

    Cheers,
    Patrick

    Jason Hendriks

    (@jasonhendriks)

    8 years, 10 months ago

    It’s likely that Thunderbird’s spam algorithm is different than Gmail’s. Gmail includes SPF in it’s SpamScore and that’s definitely one of your issues.

    Configure Postman to use your Gmail address and you should be ok.

    Thread Starter Patrick-Adapt

    (@patrick-adapt)

    8 years, 10 months ago

    Sure – that was one of my thoughts.

    Will postman allow sending to and from the same Gmail account?

    Cheers,
    Patrick

    Jason Hendriks

    (@jasonhendriks)

    8 years, 10 months ago

    Yes

    NateWr

    (@natewr)

    8 years, 10 months ago

    Thanks for jumping in and helping out Postman SMTP. Email delivery issues are a nightmare.

    Thread Starter Patrick-Adapt

    (@patrick-adapt)

    8 years, 10 months ago

    I have to say @postman, your plugin is phenomenal. It works perfectly and has been an absolute god-send! Thanks so much!

    @natewr I’m sort of pleased to hear it’s not just me! Your booking plugin is great by the way. I have a few adaptations I’d love to make, such as adding some extra columns to the tables in the admin panel etc. is the plugin Open Source in anyway? So could contribute some code for you to review and potentially implement in future versions?

    Thanks again both of you!

    Best,
    Patrick

    Jason Hendriks

    (@jasonhendriks)

    8 years, 10 months ago

    Great news 🙂

    NateWr

    (@natewr)

    8 years, 10 months ago

    Hi Patrick-Adapt,

    Yes, you can find the GitHub repository here. I’m open to pull requests, though I tend to focus on keeping things simple so may not accept all changes. Still, I’d love to hear what you have in mind so open an Issue on GitHub to talk about it if you’d like.

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)
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