Hi Cathleen,
We spend a lot of time on email deliverability which means:
- Not getting blocked or banned by rogue users trying to send spam/blasts through us
- Making sure emails hit the inbox (not spam)
- Making sure they hit the inbox fast
We send many hundreds of thousands of emails so it's a constant flow that has to be watched and optimized. We make sure to use only signed/DKIM domain names as our FROM headers to boost deliverabiliy and have a Verified Sender program so users can use their own domain names.
However, it still doesn't work 100% of the time. We tend to see certain networks throw network blocks or spam notifications at us for no reason on a whim. AOL and Comcast are particularly bad. Earthlink is sometimes bad. Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail are better than others but we see spam hits there too.
The other thing is the user's content and FROM header. Your FROM header, believe it or not, can set off spam flags as well. We've dug deep into certain users having problems (where no one else did) and found that they had history in certain spam databases that the ESP/mail exchanges check. Those users had a FROM header of like debby@mycabinrentals.com and had sent out mail lists from that same FROM header over the years that resulted in spam flags because Debby didn't use good list management. SpamAssasin or a different spam database creates a profile for Debby and things get sad for Debby.
Long story short, there's no easy good answer for why you get spam at times, but we hard to avoid it. Send a ticket in when you see one and we'll let you know if we can see why that particular one happened - most of the time they are one-offs that can be reactivated and resent.
