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I am using amazon SES for sending notification mails. Mails are getting delivered but sometimes mails are moved to spam folder. How is it so? If my method of sending mails is same then why some mails are considered as spam and others not?
Please explain.
Thanks in advance
Great question. Email deliverability (the likelihood that messages will be delivered to the inbox) depends on many different factors. It is a joint responsibility both of the platform you're using (in this case, you mention Amazon SES) and your particular sending program. Depending on whom you're sending to and what sort of inbound mail protection is in place, you will face obstacles with your email delivery if you send mail that generates recipient complaints (aka, "This is Spam" button clicks), bounces for invalid addresses, content that has spammy fingerprints, and are sending to inactive but existing addresses that could actually be spamtraps. ISPs' mission is to protect their recipients from spam, although your definition of spam and theirs can vary. At the end of the day, it's up to you to ensure you're sending email recipients want and that you're quickly removing sending to those recipients who don't want it.
Amazon SES has IP space setup specifically tailored for outbound email based on ISP (e.g., Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) requirements. We've also rolled out several features that make it dead simple to: authenticate your email Easy DKIM, test your email to ensure you have the proper bounce and complaint handling (Mailbox Simulator) and can get at ISP feedback quickly and easily through Amazon Simple Notification Service (Bounce and Complaint Notifications).
Also, we've put together a whitepaper on sending best practices we recommend. Our blog gets updated frequently and often discusses topics which will impact deliverbility. Finally, we have a resources section that offers 3rd party providers that can assist you in more detail if you're still wondering what steps to take.
We want each of customers to be successful and have the highest deliverability possible. If you find us lacking in any resources or need additional features or data that you can't currently get, I'd love to hear about it so we can make Amazon SES better.
For your particular use case, I would suggest heading over to the Amazon SES so we can troubleshoot together. Pls provide specific details about your situation so we can dig into this. Answers to these questions will help us investigate:
- What ISP are you having issues sending to?
- What type of email are you sending?
- Have your recipients opted in?
- How often do you send email to the same recipients?
- How are you acquiring new recipients?
- Do you have a sample of a message we can review?
- What are you doing with bounces and complaints?
- Are you honoring unsubscribe requests?
- How do you know you're being delivered to the spam folder and how often does it occur?
- Have you checked your content against widely available and free services such as mail-tester.com?
To see the Amazon SES blog, tech documentation, best practices whitepaper, customer forum, and other service centric stuff, pls visit: http://aws.amazon.com/ses/
To see our resources page (also included on the Amazon SES page but a bit further down), visit: http://aws.amazon.com/ses/resources/
Thanks,
Chris
P.S. I originally had this answer chock full of links for easy navigation but stackoverlfow stripped them due to spam control measures. The irony!
SES is really not good for sending important notification emails or even marketing email. The ip ranges used by SES have been flagged by most spam services due to how easy it is for spammers to use SES to send out spam.
The team I was on sent tens of millions of marketing and notification emails within the span of a day or two on a regular basis. We had to go away from SES due to deliverability issues. I might suggest you use SendGrid or similar service which provide better deliver ability rates.
The problem is that Amazon SES is used by spammers and Amazon is very slow at kicking them off the service, so their IPs tend to end up in blacklists quite often.
You'll see on their abuse complaint blog page that they use a threshold of 0.1% for determining if a user is spamming, rather than a zero tolerance policy. I've been reporting one spammer who is scraping email addresses to them for months, but they haven't done anything. I guess most people just don't bother reporting spammers. The same thing has happened to me before - you report the spammer multiple times over many months, and Amazon does absolutely nothing (apart from adding your complaint to the pile, and seeing if it goes over the 0.1% threshold).
If you're running a bulk email service you really need to have a zero-tolerance approach to spam, as Marketo and Sendgrid have. Ironically if you report spam from an ec2 server, they investigate immediately and kick off the spammer. It seems as if Amazon SES is a haven for spammers.
As per Sergey's comment, there are a number of things you can do. You should certainly be setting SPF records and DKIM signing.
There's some good content on Amazon's website here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/authentication.html
Setting DKIM on SES is actually really easy, especially if you use Route53, it will automatically create the DNS entries for you.
You can also look at Gmail's documentation for bulk senders here: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?hl=en
And I'd also suggest for good background reading, Mr Atwood has a lot to say on the matter:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/04/so-youd-like-to-send-some-email-through-code.html
Hope this helps, I'm busy dealing with the same problem at the moment.
I have been using Amazon SES for a while now just under 2 years and I see the exact same issues with spam cannibal, but I have to agree with the SES team on this one it's such a small fraction of emails that are affected and when you weigh up the costs of Amazon SES against Mailchimp etc. It's a fantastic service.
I use Sendywith Amazon SES and this gives a transparent view of exactly what is going on with your email lists as well as being a fantastic tool for actually creating and sending marketing emails / newsletters.
Another great tool is Mail-Tester using this you can see everything that is affecting the deliverability of your emails DNS settings, emails content, subject, and of course spam lists that are blocking you (yes you are guaranteed to be on spamcannibal) but it's possible to get a deliverability of 8.5/10 which is just as high as I get using mailchimp.
