Event tickets email hits spam filters due to frequency?

[Jacob Masters]

I’m having repeated issues with ticket emails hitting spam filters with the big web mail providers (gmail, yahoo) there is nothing wrong with the email content as i’ve edited this to mirror the completed email which gets through fine and when the tickets are manually sent after the purchase they get through fine also.

So the email sender or mail server or email content is not the problem. I think it must be the frequency that these emails are sent after the initial completed email goes out, i.e it goes out too soon so they assume 2 emails in less than a second is spam. Is there a way to get round this, or can they be sent at exactly the same time?

[Barry]

Hi @gabba,

Thanks for posting!

It’s certainly possible to dispatch both emails near-simultaneously and this by itself shouldn’t present much of a problem.

If you’re positive the timing alone is the problem, though, I’d imagine it’s possible to rework things and introduce a delay for one of the emails – however that would be the sort of custom development task that we unfortunately cannot provide a great deal of help with here on the forums.

Before doing something quite so drastic though I would recommend looking into your current email setup: ensuring that SPF, DKIM and various other things are correctly configured is important in terms of increasing the perceived ‘trustworthiness’ of the source mailbox.

Email configuration is itself an advanced subject and I’d recommend speaking with your host if you are unsure about any of this.

Last but not least, you could consider making use of a dedicated services such as Mail Gun or SendGrid (there are many such providers) which may result in a higher success rate.

I hope that helps!

[Barry]

…One more thought: are you sure the anti-spam measures are not in fact taking place within your own hosting environment?

It’s not infrequent for shared hosting platforms to introduce constraints that block emails from being sent when there isn’t a sufficiently large time interval between them, simply to avoid their servers being used as a source of spam.

[Jacob Masters]

Its on a dedicated server, and i can see in my exim records that the emails are going out, so that’s not it, and the fact that a resend gets through as do all the other woocommerce emails does suggest the only thing it can be is frequency as that’s the only difference.

Will certainly check spf and dkim settings and the rest as good practice, but as i say the general trustworthiness of the emails and mailserver don’t seem to be an issue as other emails and even the same email at a different time get through fine.

[Barry]

Checking those records out is definitely a good first step – let me know if that makes a difference here 🙂

There are definitely a number of email-related postings on the forums however I’m not aware of this specific issue – where major service providers like Gmail are consistently marking the 2nd email as spam – being a general problem across our userbase. That said, I’ll definitely check in with the team and double check that angle.

If you’re down to give something like Mail Gun a try (I believe they have a free tier of service so you can experiment at no charge) and see if that makes a difference then that may also be a useful test of whether or not there are configuration problems at work which are specific to your own setup.

Thanks!

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