why are my mails being sent to junk folder?

Question

I am using my own domain's email address : [email protected]

i have a simple email sign up form, where emails entered are sent to [email protected] using php's mail().

i discover it always goes into spam folder. any emails sent from mysite.com always ends up in Spam!

why is this ? this server is very new.

Answer 1

See this question for a number of good answers.

Answer 2

When did this start? Are you using SpamAssassin?

There’s a bug in SpamAssassin that causes mail received in year 2010 to receive a much higher spam score.

https://issues.apache.org/SpamAssassin/show_bug.cgi?id=6269

Running sa-update should fix the problem. Alternatively, you can locate the 72_active.cf rule file and change the line that says:

header FH_DATE_PAST_20XX Date =~ /20[1-9][0-9]/ [if-unset: 2006]

To read:

header FH_DATE_PAST_20XX Date =~ /20[2-9][0-9]/ [if-unset: 2006]

And then restart SpamAssassin.

Answer 3

Short answer, check if your IP is blacklisted. Lots of places to do this. www.mxtoolbox.com works for me. no relation or affiliation.

Longer answer, your mail client might not like the content of the test messages you're sending. Or it's seeing so many of them that it thinks it's getting spammed.

If you're not on a blacklist then set up a new email account somewhere else and try sending one message there from your server to see if that gets through.

Answer 4

Some things to check:

1. Is your IP blacklisted?
2. Are you hosting the email server yourself? Some anti-spam services will have issues with email originating from self hosted email providers.
3. Ensure that your DNS records have all the correct MX records.
4. Are you specifying all the email information from address etc?