Experience.FellowshipOne.com

I have recieved reports from some of our ministry admins stating that they believe messages that they send using group email 2.0 are filtered as SPAM. 

Answer id 284 states

 'In some cases, a Spam filter may prevent the delivery of messages being sent from Fellowship One utilizing the Group Email feature. If you are not receiving email messages from Fellowship One Group Email, then it is best to configure your Spam filter to allow all email from Fellowship One. The IP address that Group Email originates from is: 69.93.40.57 and the sending domain is: fellowshiponemail.com. This information can be used to add Fellowship One to your "safe" senders list which will then allow delivery of all email from Fellowship One. If your email is hosted by someone other than yourself, send the provider the information and they should be able to ensure that Fellowship One is added as a "safe" sender. 

Has anyone spent any time dealing with this issue? Can you share your thoughts?

Thanks

Bob

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Bob VanDerPloeg
IT Director
Discovery Church

There are whole industries that have formed to combat this with limited success. You can look at a few of the more prominent Email Service Providers like Constant Contact and Campaign Monitor and their sites are filled with tips, tricks, and workarounds for the hundreds of different ISPs and mail clients. However, ultimately they conclude its up to the end user to add the sender to their safe list. Fellowship Technologies is doing everything within our power to be compliant with the ISP expectations (which are far and above the requirements of CAN-SPAM). Unfortunately, there is still no centralized committee, agreement, or standard to which all ISPs and email clients subscribe to make this a smooth process for anyone. I recently added picture wrapped by a URL to my work email signature. I use MS Outlook as my outbound email client and now my work emails are ending up in the SPAM/JUNK folders of friends, family, and clients. As Benjamin Zander would say... How unnecessary!!

SPF records will help!  Also called Sender ID, this is a straight forward DNS implementation to help prevent Group Email from being rejected or listed as SPAM.  Below, I will detail the steps for implementing...

Recently we've been getting the following errors from livemail [hotmail] email recipients:

Your message

  To:     groupmail@recipient
  Cc:      groupmail@recipient
  Subject: Form Submission Confirmation From Irving Bible Church -
9/30/2008 10:01:53 PM
  Sent:    Tue, 30 Sep 2008 22:01:53 -0500

did not reach the following recipient(s):

BCCrecipient@hotmail.com on Tue, 30 Sep 2008 16:58:23 -0500
    The e-mail system was unable to deliver the message, but did not
report a specific reason.  Check the address and try again.  If it still
fails, contact your system administrator.
    < f1msx06.fellowshiponemail1.com #5.0.0 SMTP; 550 OU-002 Mail
rejected by Windows Live Hotmail for policy reasons. Reasons for
rejection may be related to content with spam-like characteristics or
IP/domain reputation problems. If you are not an email/network admin
please contact your E-mail/Internet Service Provider for help.
Email/network admins, please visit http://postmaster.live.com for email
delivery information and support>

So, this helpded me remember I setup an SPF record a long time ago [2005], but never added fellowshiponemail1.com domain or it's originating IP address as a valid place IRVINGBIBLE.org emails could come from.

 To start, you can check what your current [if any] SPF records indicate by sending a test email to check-auth@verifier.port25.com

There's also a SPF record creation wizard at http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/safety/content/technologies/senderid/wizard/default.aspx

At step 3 under the heading:

Outbound Mail Server Addresses

enter the following domain and IP information in addition to your normal outgoing mail server information:

208.36.200.224 /27
fellowshiponemail1.com

Our final updated SPF record for our DNS provider looks like this:

v=spf1 ip4:216.215.65.5 ptr:ibcmail.irvingbible.org ip4:208.36.200.224/27 a:fellowshiponemail1.com -all

 

Hope this helps!

Austin McCollum   |   Irving Bible Church

Austin,

The name of the server is smtp.fellowshiponemail1.com.   It's setup in DNS to resolve back to the IP addresses of the outbound servers.  If you use the name instead of the IP that means you will never have to change your SPF for Fellowship unless we change our domain name.

So it's probably best not to include the IP range just the server.

 Also if you are adding an SPF record for the first time, make sure that you include all domains that send on your behalf since adding the SPF tells everyone specifically which domains will be doing so.

 

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Sid Emory
Infrastructure Specialist
Customer Service
Fellowship Technologies