Using personal email address for newsletter sends it to spam folder

Using Ghost
1

Hi,

I recently updated my newsletter’s sender email address from noreply@customdomain.com to my personal email address. I did it under Settings > Email newsletter > Customize > Email addresses > Sender email address

It’s working, in the sense that when I send out a newsletter, the FROM field shows my personal email address, and people can reply to it.

However, I’ve noticed that the emails are now going to the spam folder, even after marking them as ‘not spam’. Also, my newsletter open rate suddenly dropped after making this change. It went from 80% to 10%.

My questions:

  1. Is it a bad idea to use a personal email address for the newsletter? Should I revert back to ‘noreply’ one? I wanted to have a personal email address so my readers could reply me directly, also it looks a bit less formal.
  2. Is there anything else I need to do so that my newsletter doesn’t end up going into the Spam directory?

Any help is really appreciated.

Regards,
Akshay

P.S. Not sure if it matters, but I’m on a Ghost PRO plan, using the Digest theme. You can find my website here.

1 Like
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I was wondering the same thing actually, so just commenting to see what comes up in the thread

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@software_writer It appears your personal email address is at @hey.com.

Receiving servers will decide whether your email is spam based in part on the SPF record for the sending domain. This record is stored in the DNS records for the domain, as a record of type “TXT”. So here I can look up the SPF record for hey.com like this:

dig TXT hey.com

Doing so returns this result:

 "v=spf1 include:_spf.hey.com ~all"

The meaning this record is documented here: SPF: SPF Record Syntax

That tells us that ~all means “Soft fail” for all IP addresses that aren’t explicitly allowed to send mail on behalf of hey.com. Since hey.com hasn’t explicitly allowed the Ghost Pro servers to send mail for the domain, the message looked forged according to SPF, and because it looks forged, receiving servers put in the spam folder.

There are a couple ways to resolve this:

  1. Since you own and control the DNS and email for your own domain name, you can set up an email at your own domain, and then update your DNS records for the domain to add an SPF record that explicitly allows Mailgun to send mail on behalf of your domain. You can search for Mailgun SPF setup to see how to do that.
  2. I’m not a Ghost Pro member, but generally it’s also possible to send mail /from/ one email address by have a Reply-To that replies back to a different address. If Ghost Pro supports that, you could send from some email that’s working, but people would still reply to your personal email address.
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Hi Mark,

Thank you so much for taking the time to write this detailed writeup, including both the problem and the solutions. I really appreciate it!!

I will contact Ghost support to see how I can implement solution 2. Will keep you posted.

Thank you!!

Regards,
Akshay