Hi there, the dreaded day has come for my little weekly newsletter: it’s been flagged as spam. My open rate has plunged from 75% to 14%. My OWN email client sent it to junk!
I’ve had runs of getting spam from txt.att.net accounts, but that was easily solved with Ghost’s domain blocking. This time though, looking at the logs in Mailgun, I see strings of 3 emails sent from my support email to a particular address. Unfortunately, they’re all Gmail, so I can’t block the domain, but the pattern is pretty clear: three support emails sent within a few seconds of each other to an email address, one that never makes it through to be a subscriber to the site. This happened for a period of about a couple of days, and seems to be back to normal traffic now. Still, I suspect some of those folks (rightfully and understantably!) tagged my support emails as spam, possibly affecting my domain’s reputation as a whole.
Please forgive me, because I am not very technically savvy. I’m running self-hosted Ghost on PikaPods with Mailgun and Postmark for DMARC (it always shows up as 100% SPF/DKIM aligned, whatever that means). I realize that being flagged as spam is a never-ending problem with no solid solutions, and that the issue may lie somewhere else. So forgive me if some of the questions I ask here are a bit basic or dumb – I’m just trying to get my head around this.
How on earth do I stop these spam Gmail sign-ups?
How can I see the content of the emails that I am sending these folks? As far as I can tell, I can’t see anywhere in Ghost or Mailgun that tells me exactly what those auto-generated emails are; I assume they are “complete signup” or “are you sure you want to unsubscribe” emails, but how do I KNOW that?
I noticed before that a lot of my spam sign-ups are coming from the page /Membership/, which… doesn’t actually exist? Can I block those?
Are there any other best practices I can adopt to boost my domain’s trust and get out of the Spam box?
Just to make sure I follow, are you saying that either bots or humans are visiting your site and entering in random yet valid email addresses to sign up for your newsletter, those emails are going to a real person’s email address, and that real person is marking it as Spam which tanks your deliverability?
I’ve seen it! Had a client with a couple thousand sign ups (over in mailchimp without email confirmation) that all had gibberish names (hello OActHvrT!) and deliverable emails. Not sure what the motivation is, but it’s a thing!
Before Ghost implemented domain blocking, I used to get bunches of successful sign-ups from gibberish names (hsdjhejs) that were entirely from cellphone email addresses ( [phonenumber]@txt.att.net), just as Cathy said. These would be successful sign-ups so they’d be in the Ghost CMS as members/subscribers, but would never open emails, so I used to remove them manually before the domain block. The domain block solved that problem. (Thank you, Ghost devs!)
The new wave, about a week ago, was different. None of them were successful sign-ups; they didn’t appear in the Ghost CMS at all. I only noticed them in Mailgun’s logs. According to those logs, my support email address would send 3 emails within 30 seconds to real-looking Gmail accounts. It was strange for many reasons:
The volume of them was not typical for my (very small) newsletter
I also hadn’t written in two months before then and hadn’t engaged in any promotion in that time, so it wasn’t like I was suddenly popular
None of the sign-ups were successful
They all received three emails within 30 seconds; it seems implausible that any real person had manually initiated three support emails from me in that timeframe…
…let alone a whole bunch of them, all on the same two days, all with the same pattern of behavior
The volume and consistency strongly suggests to me it was not authentic behavior. I have no idea why anyone would want to do that, but if you have an alternate explanation I am more than happy to hear it.
In any case, I suspect that some of those people with those Gmail accounts, on seeing unsolicited emails from me, marked them as spam – which is perfectly understandable! But I think that downgraded my newsletter’s deliverability.
I’m just a bit confused about what to do here, because they’re getting unsolicited emails that they don’t want… and I don’t want to get them, either. And I just don’t know how to stop that.