Mail is going to spam in gmail only

[guitarzan]

Having a frustrating issue; one company I deal with sends non-marketing emails to parents and players of a sports league, usually no more than 40 or 50 people at a time, all in the BCC field of outlook. These emails are received by nearly everyone, except lately they are all ending up in gmail's spam folder. Even when they send these emails to only my gmail account, they go to spam. No problems receiving on other free emails like yahoo, aol, etc.

The old email provider they had (small hosting company) did have problems (ending up on 1 or 2 spam blacklists a few times), but always followed up and got themselves removed quickly. I switched them to a new mail provider (Rackspace), but that just happened yesterday... no change in the spam problem, but too soon to tell.

My question is, how can I find out the reason why these emails are consistently ending up in gmail's spam folder? To me, there are no keywords that would raise a red flag as far as spam. Can I find out if it's a problem with email content, or a problem with reputation? Can I request any information from google? Do I have any other recourse?

I did fill out the form below, but it gives no feedback.

https://support.google.com/mail/contact/bulk_send

Any suggestions are appreciated.

 

[ChrisHirst]

Use the MXtoolbox lookup to check for blacklisting.

http://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx

Chris.

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[guitarzan]

Thanks for that Chris. mxtoolbox.com has a great set of tools, and that is how I determined that the older provider was on spam lists before. It's been maybe 2 months since they were on one, and the new one (RackSpace) is not on any lists. So if it's blacklist-related, Google would have to be using a different or very outdated list.

Rackspace support suggested that the issue was the sender including a hyperlink to their company website... the argument being that this website had some links within it, including a live twitter feed, that google could be flagging as spam and therefore putting the email in spam. Could that be correct? I admit, removing the website from the email signature has allowed more mail to bypass the gmail spam folder (but not all)

 

[guitarzan]

Well, the problem went away on its own. I suspect changing mail hosts to Rackspace ultimately solved the problem.

A colleague suggested trying sites like litmus.com and emailonacid.com to test the actual emails that are going out, so if the problem crops up again, I will go that route and see if I get more information.