Question
What does Detected as spam mean?
Answer
Nobody likes spam, and nobody likes having legitimate emails suspended as spam, yet spam is a recurring issue with email, making spam filters an everyday part of the process. Few would use email if spam filters were not in place and highly effective. Also, there are existing laws in place that require that companies act responsibly in this regard.
There are a variety of definitions of spam, ranging all the way from unsolicited bulk email to individual emails that arrived in a questionable fashion. Companies that are less than professional with your email address might sell them to a list service, of which there are many. Or a lone emailer might be abusing one of the free email accounts that are offered by Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Hotmail, etc.
How spam is detected in Zendesk Support
Zendesk Support uses one of the most respected spam filter services in the world, known as Cloudmark. While we have no direct insight into their algorithms, which keeps their process safe and secure, we are given some information in the form of encoded "fingerprints" which we can then use to examine the nature of the suspension.
You, as a Zendesk Support customer, can participate in the process also just by recovering an email from your suspended queue. Doing this sends a coded message back to Cloudmark letting them know that you believe the email to be legitimate. Depending on the cause for the spam rating this can resolve the issue for you over time, often just after a few recoveries. This allows for better results through dynamic analysis.
A sudden increase in suspended tickets for being detected as spam can cause you to feel that something has changed on Zendesk Support's side. While Cloudmark is a self-correcting mechanism its ratings can also change quickly to account for a number of factors that might be beyond your control.
A common question, particularly in a forwarding situation, is "Why doesn't Gmail recognize it as spam, but you do?" Gmail's algorithms are among the best in the world and are somewhat customized just to your usage patterns. They are designed to be permissive, particularly to emails that you have responded to from within that account, which is a thing that Cloudmark can not possibly know as there is a more tenuous relationship between the sender, your forwarding domain, and Zendesk Support, as well as Cloudmark's ability to document those historical relationships.
Reasons for suspension
Here are just a few common causes for suspensions:
- A handful of end-users marked your outbound emails as spam.
- The use of distribution groups/lists is a common cause of end-users marking emails as spam. We recommend using a dedicated support address auto-forwarding to us as outlined in this article to ensure greater deliverability.
- Your domain becomes temporarily blocked, possibly due to a pro-active outbound marketing campaign.
- Your email forwarding IP is part of a shared-hosting setup like GoDaddy, and this rating has nothing at all to do with you.
- The sender's email address is recognized as a producer of spam.
- The email was generated by an online form, like a php, which is associated with spammy practices.
- Your newsletters do not require a "double opt-in" that sends a confirmation email ensuring that the users want your weekly or monthly mailouts.
- Your attachments included suffixes many filters will act upon, such as .exe, .avi, .swf, .zip, etc.
- Poorly formatted HTML is a hallmark of spam, sometimes the result of converting an MS Word file to HTML.
- Excessive use of bright colors, fonts, sizes, images, etc.
- Multiple or excessive links to social media sites
- Having words like free, sex, Viagra, timeshare, buy now, urgent matter, medical breakthrough, money back guarantee, !!!!!!, etc. Even excessive use of the word "opportunity" can cause a raising of the rate.
- A sending or relay server is not configured for reverse DNS lookup.
- Bulk emails are sent using the BCC field.
- Signature file links direct only to sales sites.
- Your mailing lists still include users that have clicked your Unsubscribe link (or you don't have an Unsubscribe at all in your marketing emails)
- Your website doesn't let users update their profile details, which results in a lot of bounce-backs. Or, your autoresponder doesn't require confirmation, which allows people to fill your lists with false addresses.
- Even your local physical mailing address can be listed as engaging in questionable business practices or sales
There are more examples, but that covers several of the basics, just to give you an idea of how a cumulative score can add up pretty quickly. Some of these things are easily remedied while others might be out of your control, and the suspension might have nothing at all to do with your practices. Sometimes it is the order in which these things occur in the email that determines their "weight" against the threshold, particularly if an email is relayed through several servers before it gets to you.
Don't panic if you start to get a number of emails in your suspended queue. Try to see if there is a relationship between them—like if they are all being forwarded through your support email address, or if they're coming from an online form—then open a ticket with us if you feel that you have any more questions. We're always happy to take a look and try to give you a better idea of what might be happening.
10 Comments
Hi,
Reading the reason "The email was generated by an online form, like a php, which is associated with spammy practices"
I have a doubt, how can I solve this? I have to keep that email within the online form...
thanks
Hi Sergio,
If you want to unsuspend the ticket, you can just click on it and then choose to either Recover Manually or Recover Automatically. Choosing recover manually will let you edit some the ticket properties first before the ticket is recovered.
Here's an article on managing suspended tickets: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203691046-Viewing-recovering-and-deleting-suspended-tickets
Hope this helps. Thanks!
Thanks Gab but I was thinking in that "how-to" in the way to avoid this emails to be located as suspended tickets. I mean, why do I need to change in the webform?
Hi Sergio!
I think you best bet to avoid the suspended ticket queue would be to bring tickets from that form in using the API instead of email. We have some great technical experts in our Developer Community that can help you with that!
I've found more and more legitimate emails coming from customers' business emails are being marked as spam. And even though I recover them manually, future emails are still marked as spam. Is there any way we can remove all spam tags from customers to try and prevent their emails from being caught in the spam workflow?
Hey Lisa,
Have you had a chance to whitelist the email domain to see if that helps? More information on whitelisting here Using the whitelist and blacklist to control access to Zendesk Support
If you continue to experience issues let me know and I can get a ticket created on your behalf to troubleshoot further.
Cheers!
I'm getting this error for all those that I try to recover... manual recovery is less than ideal as there's quite a lot and it seems to strip out the detail too.
Hey Paul,
I'm going to generate a ticket on your behalf so our Customer Advocacy team can look into this further.
You'll receive an email shortly stating your ticket has been created.
Cheers!
Hi, I'm having an issue with my automatic responses from Zendesk, they are showing this message as a header how do I fix this?:
Hello Enrique,
Thank you for taking the time to raise this with us! While we are aware of the problem and our Development team are already working hard to resolve this, I'm going to generate a ticket on your behalf so we can look into this further. You'll receive an email shortly stating your ticket has been created and an update from us once the issue is resolved.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you or your customers, and thank you for your patience.
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