Spam/Quarantine issues with email blasts within your organization

Angela Armbruster

Has anyone else experienced issues with email blasts going into Spam/Quarantine for recipients within your own organization?

We are relatively new to using Luminate Online and this is the first event season that we are using LO. When we send out an email that includes some of our associates (we don't send system-wide emails to associates through LO), some will get the email in their Inbox while others go to Quarantine. Our organization uses Outlook and it appears that the Blackbaud IP address is blacklisted on two of the sources that Mircosoft uses. I know Blackbaud was going to reach out to one and request they update the list and remove them (not sure if that was done). The other they felt wasn't a reputable source.

Our IS team is not willing to compromise our domain to allow these messages to go through on our behalf. They are very concerned that this would then lead to our domain being blacklisted and something we simply can't risk. They have done everything they can but as it stands right now they said the issue is with the Blackbaud IP address being blacklisted and that needs to be corrected.


Has anyone else experienced this? Were you able to resolve these issues so you could consistently communicate with your own associates through LO?


Thanks!

Angela



 

Brian Mucha

"When we send out an email that includes some of our associates (we don't send system-wide emails to associates through LO), some will get the email in their Inbox while others go to Quarantine."


So your 'associates' are your employees? The issue is that some of your own employees get it and some don't?

 

Kathryn Hall

Angela, have you filed a Support ticket on this subject? It's something our email team would follow up on. We've got a team and services that monitor blacklists and responds to issues like this. First way to get engaged with this team is via Support. I can help escalate if you already have a ticket - DM me the ticket #. 

Angela Armbruster

Brian - Yes, our "associates" are the "employees" of our organization. Some of them have gotten the emails in their inbox while others said it goes to quarantine.


Kathryn - Yes, we have been working with support but we haven't been able to get this resolved yet and we need to continue to send out our event emails. We have also discussed with our customer service rep looking for assistance. In the meantime, we have been discussing some workarounds including having to forward these emails to associates from Outlook or having to create a seperate message in another platform and sending that to associates - neither option is ideal.

 

Brian Mucha

> "Our IS team is not willing to compromise our domain to allow these messages to go through on our behalf. They are very concerned that this would then lead to our domain being blacklisted and something we simply can't risk."


I don't see how whitelisting blackbaud on your own internal spam filters will have any impact on your domain being blacklisted elsewhere. All they would be doing is telling your internal spam filter to ignore the blacklists for emails coming from Blackbaud and always allow delivery to your employees. 


That said, it doesn't help delivery to other orgs that are also rejecting your email for the same reasons. You can't whitelist yourself on their systems, of course. 


I can't remember the last time we had a blacklist problem. BB is pretty good at keeping up with that.

Angela Armbruster

Brian Mucha:

> "Our IS team is not willing to compromise our domain to allow these messages to go through on our behalf. They are very concerned that this would then lead to our domain being blacklisted and something we simply can't risk."


I don't see how whitelisting blackbaud on your own internal spam filters will have any impact on your domain being blacklisted elsewhere. All they would be doing is telling your internal spam filter to ignore the blacklists for emails coming from Blackbaud and always allow delivery to your employees. 


That said, it doesn't help delivery to other orgs that are also rejecting your email for the same reasons. You can't whitelist yourself on their systems, of course. 


I can't remember the last time we had a blacklist problem. BB is pretty good at keeping up with that.

Blackbaud asked to have our IS team modify our DNS records and add other domains to our SPF record. Our IS team told us they won't do that as it would compromise our domain. 

Angela Armbruster

Angela Armbruster:

 

Brian Mucha:

> "Our IS team is not willing to compromise our domain to allow these messages to go through on our behalf. They are very concerned that this would then lead to our domain being blacklisted and something we simply can't risk."


I don't see how whitelisting blackbaud on your own internal spam filters will have any impact on your domain being blacklisted elsewhere. All they would be doing is telling your internal spam filter to ignore the blacklists for emails coming from Blackbaud and always allow delivery to your employees. 


That said, it doesn't help delivery to other orgs that are also rejecting your email for the same reasons. You can't whitelist yourself on their systems, of course. 


I can't remember the last time we had a blacklist problem. BB is pretty good at keeping up with that.

Blackbaud asked to have our IS team modify our DNS records and add other domains to our SPF record. Our IS team told us they won't do that as it would compromise our domain. 

Our IS team told us they whitelisted outboundmail.convio.net as safely as they could. 

 

M OConnell

OP - did you ever get this resolved and how? 

We too are starting to experience this within our own organization.


We're behind a Barracuda filter and some of our LO emails sent out --via LO -- that usually end up in our HQ employee inboxes are now being caught in the filter (only some). I should also mention we're using Outlook.


Thanks for any insights you might have!

Angela Armbruster

We had the same issue were some would be caught and put in either Spam or Quarantine and others would make it through. We actually created a new email address (using a different domain than our corporate emails) to use for sending our emails through LO. In using the other domain the emails aren't coming up as being "Spoofed" from the corporate domain. So far they haven't reported any of the emails going into Spam/Quarantine.


Angela

Philip Nawrocki

@m Oconnel. I have noticed issues with Barracuda filter as well.


It seems some months it is soft bouncing e-mails that have Barracuda filters and then other months it does not.


We do not have content that would/should be blocked as we are sending our monthly newsletter from the same e-mail address and has the same look and feel. I have only noticed this on our monthly newsletter, but will need to look into the other e-mails we send.


Maybe BB can work with Barracuda to figure this out.

 

John Alan

Possible to get me the support ticket - I'm happy to review.  Since literally anyone can create a blacklist, they don’t all have the same impact on deliverability.  Mailbox providers and filtering companies do not leverage inbox placement on every blacklist.  They typically combine data from various public blacklists, as well as data from their own networks, to determine your credibility as a sender. Subsequently, there are many blacklisting sites that are low-priority and have little to no effect on IP reputation.  The major ESPs prefer to disregard the feedback from these sites and look only at high-priorityBL services like SpamHaus and SpamCop. Blackbaud IPs are not listed on either of these sites.  (In the rare instance we are listed by one of these two sites we take immediate steps to request delisting as quickly as possible.  In some cases the blacklister is able to provide us with at least the subject line of the offending email and we can trace it back to the client that sent the campaign and work with them same day.)

Angela Armbruster:

Brian - Yes, our "associates" are the "employees" of our organization. Some of them have gotten the emails in their inbox while others said it goes to quarantine.


Kathryn - Yes, we have been working with support but we haven't been able to get this resolved yet and we need to continue to send out our event emails. We have also discussed with our customer service rep looking for assistance. In the meantime, we have been discussing some workarounds including having to forward these emails to associates from Outlook or having to create a seperate message in another platform and sending that to associates - neither option is ideal.