At my company, we do pre-employment testing via a third-party vendor’s website. I am the one charged with sending out instruction emails to candidates (go to this website, enter your info like this, use this passcode).
Because I don’t want to type this info over and over, I have simply saved the first sent email I composed and when a candidate needs a test, I open that saved sent email, use the “Resend This Message” function, change the To: address and the passcode and send it off.
Yahoo! in particular tends to snag these emails and put them in the junk folder, but other providers do this, too.
Am I to blame? Does this have something to do with the headers?
The only way to know for sure is go create a Yahoo email account and test it. It could be a word that’s flagging it or a combination, you won’t know for sure.
Yahoo may have tighter filters. I would create a yahoo account, go to your options and choose the strictest spam filter setting (other than whitelist) then try it till it gets through. Then set up an additional Yahoo email and try again.
Filters can be set up by Yahoo, by your ISP or by the recipent. At worst your IP address could be on a known list of spammers
Just sent this to my personal Yahoo! account and it went thru fine. Headers look normal, so I think I’m going to absolve myself, go forth, and sin some more.
Spam filters always strive to remove the largest amount of spam with the fewest amount of false positives, so the best you can do is report your email as “Not Spam” in the Yahoo! webmail interface.
Alternatively, you could put “please whitelist hiring@niblet_head.com in your email provider. We are not responsible for lost or mis-flagged email”, and put the onus onto the employee to do so.
Most filtering is not content based, but blacklist based. Im guessing your company email server was used for spamming, you work for spammers or people who dont honor unsubscribes, a mass mailing trojan ran on your network, etc etc.
You can get the IP address of your mail server from a variety of ways (mx record, headers in email, etc) and test it on a blacklist. This site makes it easy:
but you should contact your IT admin about this.
Yahoo is tougher than most with spam, and may require your company to implement SPF.
There are other things the big sites like yahoo do to evaluate the “spamminess” of incoming mail:
[ul]
[li]They’ll look at DKIM and SPF records for your domain if they’re present. Both of these are systems that reduce the ability for random spammers to send email which falsely claims your domain as its source. If you can get your mail administrators to set up one or both of these, that might help.[/li][li] They’ll make sure that the sending server identifies itself with the correct name. Since a lot of recipients don’t check this, many servers are misconfigured and send a bogus name in the SMTP “HELO” message. If your mail server is sendomatic.niblet_head.com, it is supposed to say “HELO sendomatic.niblet_head.com” at the start of the conversation, but a misconfigured server might just say “HELO sendomatic”, which works most of the time but not if the recipient wants to be a stickler.[/li][li] They’ll check to make sure the sending server IP has a valid reverse DNS name.[/li][/ul]
These are all things which, if your mail administrator doesn’t have them configured the “right” way, won’t necessarily cause general delivery problems, but some sites will count these factors against you when considering whether your mail is spam.
I use Yahoo for one of my accounts. It is quite common that the first e-mail that I receive from a new contact will wind up in my spam folder. Once I find the e-mail in the spam folder (usually after a “where is that e-mail” call), I can open it and click “not spam”. After I do that, all future e-mails from the sender go into my regular in box.
If you’re being rejected by the larger ISPs but not the smaller ones, chances are it’s a content-based rejection rather than your headers. Smaller mom-and-pop ISPs block on the basis of the SMTP envelope because they can’t afford the bandwidth and processor cycles wasted of downloading everything and then scanning for spam spoor. The mom-and-pop operation will, as ntucker suggested, check make sure the HELO curtains match the DNS carpet and maybe verify your IP range isn’t on one of the major blacklists. After that, once you’re through the door, you get dutifully plopped into the appropriate mailbox, spam or not. It’s only the larger ISPs with cycles to spare which scan email as a courtesy to their customers. As far as the ISP is concerned, once they’ve accepted the email on the basis of the envelope, the damage is done. Scanning it afterward is throwing good cycles after bad, since the bandwidth is already wasted.
Since you say it’s the larger ISPs which are tagging your messages as spam, I’d go through your email and figure out which phrases look too close to “Viagra,” “Russian brides,” “hot, wet lesbians” or “casino.” It might be something as simple as the fact that you’re instructing people to go to a particular URL, which looks awfully spammy to anti-spam software.
