So I'm looking at my recent subscribers and I've gotten many complaints about them not receiving email confirmations. Here's the breakdown Gmail = receive email but sometimes in spam Yahoo = no email at all from auction site, not even in spam Hotmail = no email at all from auction site Lots of my users are yahoo users and hotmail users. As a result, they're not getting the confirmation email and likely dropping off. I'm afraid I might be losing them just on this basis. Any ideas on how to fix?
As a temporary workaround, I've allowed users to be automatically activated as soon as they sign up. I'm almost sure this will lead to some unintended consequences, just not yet sure what... wish me luck.
Are you on shared hosting? Someone else on your IP address might be spamming. The only sustainable solution really is moving to your own server (VPS) with your own IP address (and then set up feedback loops with all the major email providers).
Thanks Jan. Nope, not on shared hosting. But I have my actual emails sent from a zoho server, and using the zoho app/ website (not self-hosted), whereas the Webid installation sends from the IP address where it's hosted (I'm assuming). I'm not very knowledgeable but as far as I can tell, this is how it is. Do you think this is the reason? I still need to learn about feedback loops... after new year...
IP reputation requires a lot of patience and effort… First, you should find out the IP address of the outgoing messages, then make sure that the IP is not shared (otherwise you'd keep fighting for reputation forever), and then work on blacklists, feedback loops etc. Also find out where bounces are going to, and monitor your bounces meticulously. Each bounce can potentially reveal a reputation problem to you.
Unfortunately, I don't even receive a bounce message. It's as if Yahoo routed my message to a black hole. If it were bouncing, I'd have a better idea what's happening. I'm sure I can receive a bouncing message because I receive feedback (emails) on the email no-reply@[websitename] .com but none from Yahoo nor Hotmail. I understand that digitalocean doesn't support shared IPs so I don't think I'm on a shared IP. Thanks for your comments thus far, as it's helpful in guiding my thinking... just not there yet to a solution.
And if you don't pay digitalocean for a private IP, then you most probably don't have one. Check your invoice.
So I finally found the bounce emails from yahoo. They were in (cue in ironic music) the spam folder. Let me see about fixing the errors, and then hopefully get Yahoo to clear my site.
But for anyone in the future reading this thread, here's the official word from digitalocean. It is one less thing to worry about, at least. One of the possibilities is that the former owner of the IP abused the IP and so now Yahoo thinks I'm a spammer. There are other things I'd need to fix as well of course Digitalocean support says: "Each droplet has it's own IP address, since if that wasn't the case the network would simply not function. However the IPs are reused once free ..."
Yahoo and Hotmail both consider our e-mail format that we use Spam. Our e-mail system uses the same format that spambots use. Even after I add my email address from my Webid site into my address book, a lot of times the e-mail still goes to the Spam Folder.