Gmail blocking emails from GP

I know a number of you have been having trouble getting emails from Gamers' Plane over the last few weeks. Looks like 2-3 weeks ago, Gmail started blocking all emails from the Gamers' Plane server, and I've been unable to figure out why so far. If you're not getting emails and would like to change your email address, just email contact@gamersplane.com and I'll change it for you. If you know anything about mass emails, email servers, and Gmail, please reach out to me, or if you know someone with experience, please refer them to me? I'm ready to pay a reasonable consult fee to help solve this problem.

It seems that they are going to Spam. I wasn't getting them, and just now checked my SPAM folder and sure enough there they are. It may be that some people are clicking the emails are spam, which would trigger Gmail to block them.

Also, I have seen some spam in your forums, where people are advertising for things. Perhaps they triggered something as well?

I just reported your email as NOT spam, so we will see what happens.

I also just reported a GP message in my Gmail spam folder as Not Spam.

I don't know what Google's algorithms are, but I'm guessing GP reached a threshold on the amount of mail being sent out within a certain time frame. I'd imagine if a person is subscribed to multiple forums and they all fired off messages with the same subject line "New Posts," that might automatically send the messages to spam without the user marking them.

For what it's worth, I've never had any GP mail sent to spam. However, I only subscribed to one forum, and I've only tagged new D&D 5e games to send me notifications, so the amount of mail being sent to me was minimal and certainly not enough to trigger any red flags.

I don't know if this is possible in the underlying code or database, but perhaps we could compile the notifications and send them out in timed intervals? For example, instead of receiving 10 emails from 10 different games each notifying me that there's a new post, I could receive 1 email saying there were 10 new posts. These notifications could be sent out every hour, or every two hours, whatever frequency is deemed appropriate. We could group these messages by time (10 posts across all games within the past hour) or by game itself (10 posts from subscribed game).

If grouped by time, the subject line could use the format "Number new posts from your subscribed games" to add some variation. Grouping by game might use the subject "Number new posts from Game System Game Name."

Personally, I prefer grouping messages by total posts across all subscribed games. That way, if they're only sent every hour, that's at most 24 emails delivered to my inbox.

Yah, I can rewrite it to bulk messages. I also noticed I'm sending out one email per notification; instead, I should assemble a list of all users who'd get the notification and send that (not sure if Gmail would be more ok with 100 identical emails to individual people, or one email to 100 bcc people).

Sounds like a listserv.

Well I was using gmail and I was getting the GP emails very sporadically (some were hitting my inbox, some were in spam, and some just never arrived anywhere) and in most cases they were hours/days after the post that triggered them. I swapped to using a Yahoo mailbox and now I’m getting every e-mail I should and they’re coming through within 10 minutes typically

https://www.rackaid.com/blog/gmail-blacklist-removal/

I just dug through my Spam folder and found the most recent email from 12/15.
I clicked it as Not Spam now but I don't know if that will fix the issue and know that I know this is an issue, might explain why so many of my games are so quiet.

It didn't fix it for me, I haven't received emails since then either. I get phone updates from my gmail and don't really want to change it, so hope it gets fixed soon.

Mine have not been coming through either. I tried unsubscribing from all, then subscribing to only the couple of threads I needed and still not anything.

I'd love to see a fix for this include a daily summary of all threads, or at least the name of the thread with notice of a new post and the number of posts.

Best solution to see your stuff if you aren't getting emails is to click LATEST POSTS at the bottom of the home screen. It's customized for you and shows read/unread.

Still working on it, sorry :/

I don't know what happened but I seem to have started getting them more frequently. It went from very rarely showing up in spam days late but today I woke up to my set label stock full with new recent posts.

Same here. I’m getting notifications again. 😁

I started to get notifications again also :)

I found a few in gmail spam. No where near actual volume, but non-zero

Ok, sounds like marking them as not spam is helping? And I'll keep working on more reliable emails, though I haven't found one that's cost effective yet.

I think the recent elections in the US and Canada have shown that if you can flag them as coming from Russia, nobody at the tech companies treats them as a security threat

The emails started coming back through today!

Frankly, I really appreciate all of the communication from this site. Really, you are class acts and take care of us. This is why this is a community, and not "just another site."

Thank you :)

I did that and only one time before they started coming back through

I added the gamersplane email address to my contacts list and immediately started getting notifications again.

Does this work for folks hoping to verify an account, too? Thanks

There's no dkim record showing for the domain, and the email provider you use isn't listed as safe for bulk email, so it's highly likely that the problem will happen again.

Possible solutions or partial solutions include creating adkim record or limiting the amount of emails sent out by doing hourly or daily pushes.

Hm... I add a dkim years ago, but maybe I created it incorrectly?

I need to figure out how to setup a dkim with my current server, if even possible. I may have to go for another service, which... would get expensive.

Ok, more correct research shows I do have a domain key, but for some reason, DigitalOcean only lets me label it 'gamersplane.com._domainkey.gamersplane.com'. I think it's supposed to be 'gamersplane.com._domainkey'?

Hopefully last follow up: I'm an idiot. I added the DKIM tags to the DNS and assumed that was all I had to do. Looks like I need to also attach it to the messages themselves, since the server uses it's own local SMTP, not my mail server (I'm currently unsure how to get the server to use my mail server). I guess more info = good?

THESE PAGES show you how to redirect from DigitalOcean to another provider.

Sorry if I was unclear. Records are setup; everything points from DigitalOcean correctly. The app server sends emails from it's own default SMTP, and thus never gets the KDIM tags. I feel certain emails I send (eg, through Thunderbird, not the app server) have the dkim attached, thus why they have a much lower failure rate.

Ah. What setup are you using for email in general? (If it would not be a good idea to put that here, shoot me a PM?)

I don’t get any emails and I use BT yahoo

Sorry, missed this message. Currently, I use the built in mail service on the server. I never configured it. It's not something I have any experience with :/

+1 for this! Often, small public libraries will get their domains blacklisted by email servers because they use consumer ISP email accounts and send out auto-generated overdue notices in bulk that seem suspicious. Have you checked to see if the domain has been blacklisted?

I have dealt several times with the problem, that emails are mistakenly identified as spam.

At first you should send an e-mail to the email address which you can see when you visit following page: https://www.mail-tester.com
Just create a account at gamersplane with the email address.
Mail-Tester will present you very good recomendations.

If you reach a score of 10/10 points and the mails are still identified as spam i would recommend to use sendgrid. Those Mailservers can be whitelisted. I have used this service in large E-Commerce projects with great results.

I hope this helps.

spam?

This one doesn't even have a cover story to make it subtle.

Spam accounts, step up your game

Boo! I agree! At least make an attempt to deceive us, spam. You can do better!

Did we ever get this Gmail notification/trash issue sussed out?

Asking for a friend....






I'm the friend.
I'm back.
I think I'm back.


I'm trying to be back.

It seems to come and go Matt. I'm looking into how much various mail services will cost GP, and may go with that method. Otherwise, it'll just be keep trying to work on it.

I've noticed that my game invites do eventually show up in my Gmail inbox, they're just really delayed.

I use a Yahoo mail address and I get them pretty much instantly

Note mass email addresses will get you flagged faster as spam than individual emails and yes too many emails to the same email address can get you flagged as spam -- then its a hassle to get that flagged state to not be flagged -- or enough flagged states can get you completely blocked which is even harder to get undone

Digests are generally the best route to take and not sending more than one or two emails per day to any single individual is best as well. Yeah it kind of depends on gmails criterion but most of the email handlers use pretty much the same criterion best thing to do is contact gmail support to find out what you can do since you are not spamming but sending emails at users requests -- which btw you might need to outline a bit better when they are setting things up -- I think there is a way to send a "test" message and have the user do something that keeps any subsequent emails from getting flagged as spam

Been I while since I worked with this kind of auto-emailing but that was pretty much the case a while back and I doubt it has changed much

I think a daily digest of a user's all notifications in one email may help this, and I'd also prefer that instead of so many emails.

If GP isn't sending mass emailings, so that isn't the issue here. I think it's really just a Gmail problem, not a problem with how GP handles emailing.

Again having worked with that -- I know some of what gets emails flagged as spam which I tried to outline -- the problem is if you get flagged as a spammer it is rather difficult (or at least it used to be) to get that changed and always required contacting the email handler

Yes, but if you've been flagged as a spammer, you are banned from servers. The problem isn't that emails aren't getting delivered at all, but that they are mostly either getting delayed or routed to spam.

Yeah I think now a days they have thresholds of some sort -- but I could be wrong on that one -- I know it used to be mostly black or white with a little bit of a gray zone -- it all depended on what got you flagged as there were different elements to it -- I think it had to do with potential spam versus sufficiently verified spam

Mine too, all delayed about 6 hours or so.

Delays are normally not anything to be concerned about as that could simply be processing issues and/or routing issues

Heck more recently I have gotten Text chat message on my phone like 24 hours later or more