FAQ - Emails sent from the application go into the SPAM folder

This FAQ will give you advice when Emails sent from your hosted application are received into the SPAM folder, are removed by the recipient's Antivirus system or are never received.

Why?

When you send emails from your application, emails are sent as if they were sent by any other email software. This means that your email transfer may experience the same problems like any other email you send, like the following:

- Your email subject can be modified by the recipient email reader by adding a tag "May be SPAM", "X-Spam" or similar.

- All your emails may be moved automatically into your recipient's SPAM folder, so the recipient may not see your message without going into their SPAM folder.

- Your email can be deleted by your recipient's computer automatically before it could be read by your recipient.

Of course, all of is bound to occur only if your email is analyzed and flagged as being a SPAM email. In most cases, true personal or business emails are not flagged as SPAM, but Anti-SPAM systems are not 100% reliable and may sometimes make a bad decision. In the following section, we will look at what you can do if this occurs.

What to do?

This are several reasons and things to check:

* Check that the method used to send emails is SMTPS and not PHPMail. With Dolibarr application, you can go on menu Home - Setup - Emails to check this. If you did not set your email sending to use the SMTP server of your Email Service Provider, this is surely the main reason why your emails are received into SPAM (the default setup can not be as reliable as your own Email service provider). Change this to use the SMTPS method. You must ask your Email Service Provider what are the credentials and parameters to use.
Note: Some examples of Setup with popular Email Service Providers ar available on this page.

* Check the sender email address. Sender email address MUST always be an existing email address. Nearly all Anti-SPAM systems will systematically remove emails if the sender email address is not a valid email address.

* Check the subject of your email. Do not use titles like "Not a SPAM", "I need you", or any subject that looks like a subject often used into SPAM emails. Avoid using subjects that have too many uppercase characters.

* Check the body of your email. Do not use "test" content like "test test test" of "qwerty" or any sentences that looks like sentences often used in SPAM emails. Avoid red color text and large font size.

* If you attached files, ensure that the files are virus-free.

Note: If the recipient email is a Gmail account, when you read the email message with the web Gmail interface (www.gmail.com), you may find on top of the email, a message starting with "Why is this message in Spam?".  The error message may give you the reason why your email was flagged as SPAM.

Don't forget that: if at least one recipient receives your EMail, even if it is received as SPAM, having emails going into SPAM is often because you did not use the SMTPS method. If yes, the problem is in the contents of your email (sender email, content of subject or body, or attached files). The problem is not with the system that sent the message.