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Emails marked as SPAM by RELAY

This article refers to the emails that are marked as SPAM by the GINERNET relay.

If your emails are marked as SPAM by the recipient, check this other article -> My emails arrive as SPAM

At GINERNET we have a relay service implemented on our managed servers whose functionality is to run an antispam check on sent emails.

This functionality is especially useful when a customer’s website has been hacked and the attacker takes the opportunity to send SPAM. In this way, we block these emails.

In some cases, it may be the case that a legitimate email is mistakenly classified as SPAM is what is known as a false positive and in this article, we are going to show you how to solve it.
When an email is marked as SPAM by the relay, you receive a bounced email that indicates that it has not been delivered and in the content you will find something similar to this:
Relay marked spam
There are 4 sections that you should consider:
MarkedAsSpam
  • In red, it indicates the total AntiSpam score, any value greater than 4 will cause the email to be classified as SPAM
  • In orange, it indicates the name of all the rules that have affected
  • In blue, the individual score for each rule
  • In green, a little explanation. You can see more detailed explanations and in Spanish here..
In this specific example we can see that there are 4 rules that have affected the mail to be classified as SPAM, with a score of 7 over the maximum allowed which is 4.

BAYES_50. It is a Bayesian filter rule. It considers 50% that the email is SPAM, based on the subject and content of the message itself. 50% is not much, therefore it only scores 0.8 points. It is not a failure as such and almost does not affect the score.

HTML_MIME_NO_HTML_TAG. The mail has been sent in HTML format, but it does not include the own tags of the HTML code The failure is caused by the program with which the mail is sent. We recommend updating the program. It is a mid-level failure, it should be corrected to ensure that the recipient does not mark the email as Spam

MIME_HTML_ONLY The mail was sent in HTML format and does not include a text-only version. A Content-Type: multipart/alternative must be submitted; The failure is caused by the program with which the mail is sent. We recommend updating the program. It is a mid-level failure; it should be corrected to ensure that the recipient does not mark the email as Spam.

SPF_NONE The sender’s domain does not have an SPF record. The SPF record is a registry that is added automatically when we create a hosting account, it serves to legitimize a client. If that email was sent without SPF, it is very likely a spammer. It is a critical failure, the mail should not be sent like this, that’s why it has been scored 4 hit points. Even if the mail had not been blocked by our relay, the recipient would surely have marked it as SPAM and the reputation of our server would have been penalized for future shipments.

Last conclusions

Thanks to our blocking rules, Relay AntiSpam has a very good reputation, for this reason practically 100% of the emails sent by our clients are delivered to the recipients’ inbox. Less than 0.3% of the emails sent by our clients are incorrectly marked as SPAM. In these cases, we provide the necessary information to correct the problem in the bounce email.

Less than 0.3% of the emails sent by our clients are incorrectly marked as SPAM.
In these cases, we provide the necessary information to correct the problem in the bounce email.