E-Mail from WHMCS ends up in Junk/Spam Folder of outlook.com / gmail

[mhermann]

Hi. I am using WHMCS in SMTP-sending mode. The e-mails to our customers are always ending up in the spam folders of major providers.  What is interesting: If I send an email using an Outlook-client through our mailserver it gets delivered correctly as ham to outlook.com/hotmail.

I started investigating... Reverse PTR correct, SPF correct, but than I ran a header analyses on mxtoolbox.com and found that whmcs is somehow changing the HELO ( smtp.mailfrom=info@mydomain.de smtp.helo=www.mydomain.de). The mailserver is usually using mail.mydomain.de

 

Any ideas how to fix that? It is very anoying to not being able to deliver emails correctly.

[TheHostingHeroes]

try using SMTP with SMTP authentication and see if it helps in your WHMCS config.

[mhermann]

I am using username/password with smtp. However there is no extra button to configure SMTP auth or am I missing something?

[WHMCS ChrisD]

@mhermann thanks for your post, in Setup > General Settings > Mail you should be able to enter your SMTP Server, username, password and choose SSL, TLS or None as the security.  Can you confirm are which platform you are using to send emails?

[mhermann]

Everything is setup as you suggested. I also checked the mail.log and it is showing a correct sasl-auth.

 

[WHMCS ChrisD]

@mhermann are you using a third party app to send emails like gMail or Office365 or just a standard mail server?

Have you checked your domain on a tool like MXToolbox to see if your domain is blacklisted?

[mhermann]

Hi. No we are using regular postfix on the same host sending several thounsand mails each day which don't end up in spam-folders.

MX-Toolbox shows no errors for the domain and the mailserver.

[BigGainz]

I am following along with this also.  5 emails are sent in total when someone purchases from me.  Everyone receives the first 4, the 5th one either ends up in everyones spam folder or just totally blocked by the email provider.  Of course it is the most important one that contains their username and password.  I cant seem to figure out how to make it look any less spammy.

[mhermann]

11 hours ago, BigGainz said:

I am following along with this also.  5 emails are sent in total when someone purchases from me.  Everyone receives the first 4, the 5th one either ends up in everyones spam folder or just totally blocked by the email provider.  Of course it is the most important one that contains their username and password.  I cant seem to figure out how to make it look any less spammy.

Interesting, but seems to be a different problem...

[david891]

Hello,

I am having a similar issue, emails for "client sign up" "account information" and "email address validation" are spamming. I have all records set up and spam assisn says not spam. I am also using SMTP and a dedicated IP. 

Any suggestions?

Regards,
David

[mhermann]

Hi David,

when I send the same e-mail, same adresse, same IP, same content from outlook instead of WHMCS it works.

It must be a WHMCS problem. I ended up signing up for the AWS Mail Gateway. It's free up to a certain amount and somehow that is working. I don't know if Amazon is changing the mail headers or just has a much better reputation. However. Result: It is working now.

Another anoying WHMCS-situation ended (without the help of WHMCS - of course 😉 )

Edited April 18, 2020 by mhermann

[wsa]

This is going on a long time I get also when my clients use like Gmail, Yahoo or outlook it go to spam. I need to kept telling my clients to check the spa,/junk folder

Edited April 18, 2020 by wsa

[david891]

6 hours ago, mhermann said:

Hi David,

when I send the same e-mail, same adresse, same IP, same content from outlook instead of WHMCS it works.

It must be a WHMCS problem. I ended up signing up for the AWS Mail Gateway. It's free up to a certain amount and somehow that is working. I don't know if Amazon is changing the mail headers or just has a much better reputation. However. Result: It is working now.

Another anoying WHMCS-situation ended (without the help of WHMCS - of course 😉 )

I have tried to set this up but admin error of is "Email Sending Failed - SMTP Error: data not accepted." did you have this issue setting up AWS?

[mhermann]

I had some issues in the beginning as well

SMTP

Base64

Port 587

TLS

Worked for me

[zitu4life]

8 hours ago, wsa said:

This is going on a long time I get also when my clients use like Gmail, Yahoo or outlook it go to spam. I need to kept telling my clients to check the spa,/junk folder

I do believe gmail, outlook do it intentionally send email to junk, because they want us to assign to their package G-suite  and office 365 email.
It is really frustrating offer email accounts with hosting because  customer can not have a reliable email service. First I was thinking my email goes to junk because I do not have a dedicated server yet, but VPS...Now I see guys say even on dedicated emails go to spam...I can only imagine that Gmail and outlook do it intentionally.

Hope you find a better email configuration guys and share it on the community. In my case, after I assign to g suite email, now all my emails goes directly to customer inbox.

But I am afraid to sell hosting saying to customer that they can have a company\professional email, if emails goes all to junk 😓

Edited April 18, 2020 by zitu4life

[mhermann]

@zitu4life You are talking about a different problem. In your case: Every email from your network goes to spam folders. In my case and as I believe in davids case only WHMCS mails go to spam-folders. Every other email from my network is going into inboxes as expected.

[BigGainz]

Just like my issue also.  Customers get a total of 5 emails throught out the purchasing process.  4 go too their inbox, the last and most important one is the one that goes to junk/spam

[zitu4life]

14 hours ago, mhermann said:

@zitu4life You are talking about a different problem. In your case: Every email from your network goes to spam folders. In my case and as I believe in davids case only WHMCS mails go to spam-folders. Every other email from my network is going into inboxes as expected.

In that case, I would think the way WHMCS deal with reader emails, could be one of issue, but not sure.

[AlexMartin]

Hello.

Did you guys got the issue resolved ?

I didn't get this issue, we configured our mails over gsuit. Now I can see normally our all mails landing in inbox but in case of whmcs auto generated mails all of them landing in Spam folder. We checked with rediffmail and in this case it goes to Inbox.

I guess it's the issue with whmcs and gmail. Can anybody help us how to proceed, our IP reputation, blacklists, DKIM, SPF records and PTR records are all ok as of now.

[AJX]

Hi all,

We have the same problem, and gmail spams our emails while our IP is not in a blacklist and our reverse DNS, SPF, DKIM and DMARC our OK.

Do you know how we should resolve this problem?

[sol2010]

Just started getting this issue with Gmail.  Sending through WHMCS SMTP to cpanel server then out to clients.

Have correct PTR, DKIM, SPF and DMARC all set up good via cloudflare and have checked blacklists - all clean - but Gmail says "lots of emails from domain.com are identified as spam". 

We are not spamming anyone, only sending out invoices and support replies.  Some customers are not paying invoices citing "never received the invoice"

 

Edited October 2, 2023 by sol2010

[Precipitate]

system emails to clients with gmail addresses are not being received.

using PHPMail.

has anyone found a solution for this issue?

[leemahoney3]

9 hours ago, Precipitate said:

system emails to clients with gmail addresses are not being received.

using PHPMail.

has anyone found a solution for this issue?

Check your SPF record is correct and switch to SMTP.

[CMS911]

I have SMTP enabled and I have SPF, DMARC and DKIM all setup. However, WHMCS seems to be modifying the DKIM signature after sending the email.
 

[monsterit]

I would look through the Dkim and see what might be causing this. Is your server running an AV/clammail? which can then distort the dkim.