Spam Check Report + Hotmail Spam issues?

Megan Vandekerckhove

Hello!


Recently my spam check report has been giving me a score of 0.0. It gives me this: NO_RELAYS Informational: message was not relayed via SMTP   NO_RECEIVED Informational: message has no Received headers  

-0.0

-0.0

Is this an internal issue or is there something I need to do on my end to fix it? The results are the same if I use Chrome or IE.


In addition to this, I noticed our eNewsletter had a much lower open rate even though our database had grown significantly. I checked the soft bounce report and over 1,000 hotmail users did not get our email. Does anyone have experience with this recently?


I'm not sure how to fix any spammy content if the spam checker is failing.

Colleen Gutierrez

Hi Megan - Sorry that this is happening. I've not seen that response before, and something seems amiss. I recommend contacting Support to have a look.


- Colleen

Mark Koopman

Megan Vandekerckhove:

Hello!


Recently my spam check report has been giving me a score of 0.0. It gives me this:

NO_RELAYS Informational: message was not relayed via SMTP   NO_RECEIVED Informational: message has no Received headers  

-0.0

-0.0

Is this an internal issue or is there something I need to do on my end to fix it? The results are the same if I use Chrome or IE.


In addition to this, I noticed our eNewsletter had a much lower open rate even though our database had grown significantly. I checked the soft bounce report and over 1,000 hotmail users did not get our email. Does anyone have experience with this recently?


I'm not sure how to fix any spammy content if the spam checker is failing.

Hi Megan,


We are experiencing similar issues here...did you get an answer from support on this?


Thanks,


Markl

Guzel duChateau

I'm actually going to jump on the bandwagon with this question as we have also been having similar problems with hotmail addresses. Did you hear anything back from support on the topic?


-Guzel

Megan Vandekerckhove

I will definitely contact support on Monday and report back ASAP! Sorry about that!

Mark Koopman

So far support is stating that it is not their problem.  I sent along some further analysis for them to digest on the large jump in our hotmail soft bounces and have heard nothing back.

Jessica Sotelo

-> Regarding the spam check failure, when I reported to support in December, the final status of my support case was that they had "forwarded to engineering for consideration in future version".

Maria Diestro

Jessica Sotelo:
-> Regarding the spam check failure, when I reported to support in December, the final status of my support case was that they had "forwarded to engineering for consideration in future version".

We ran our softbounce emails through a service and noticed we had a huge amount that were getting bounced back from Hotmail too. Glad to know we're not the only ones experiencing this.  Do you guy continue to send to these emails? 

Philip Nawrocki

@Megan  Did you ever get a chance to contact support? If so, what did they say.


Are the people in this thread still experiencing this? We just started to encounter this issue this month.


Thanks,


Phil

Guzel duChateau

Phil,


We had major issues this month with Hotmail, and actually all related Microsoft based emails (outlook.com, msn.com, live.com). When I got a response from Support on Friday I was told they had an issue relating to erroneous blacklisting. The issue has been resolved and things should work now. So far this week, things seem to be okay, but we'll see. 


-Guzel

John Alan

Megan Vandekerckhove:

Hello!


Recently my spam check report has been giving me a score of 0.0. It gives me this:

NO_RELAYS Informational: message was not relayed via SMTP   NO_RECEIVED Informational: message has no Received headers  

-0.0

-0.0

Is this an internal issue or is there something I need to do on my end to fix it? The results are the same if I use Chrome or IE.


In addition to this, I noticed our eNewsletter had a much lower open rate even though our database had grown significantly. I checked the soft bounce report and over 1,000 hotmail users did not get our email. Does anyone have experience with this recently?


I'm not sure how to fix any spammy content if the spam checker is failing.

I did some digging around that specific error and it appears it was something within SPAM Assassin from three years ago that was resolved.  I'm not sure why you'd be seeing that now.  Do you have the case number from Support?

John Alan

Guzel duChateau:

Phil,


We had major issues this month with Hotmail, and actually all related Microsoft based emails (outlook.com, msn.com, live.com). When I got a response from Support on Friday I was told they had an issue relating to erroneous blacklisting. The issue has been resolved and things should work now. So far this week, things seem to be okay, but we'll see. 


-Guzel

I can attest to what Support told you.  We were erroneously listed by SPAMhaus (a high-priority blacklister) which resulted in MS-owned domains and AT&T-owned domains blocking/throttling us.  Reaching back out to SPAMhaus we questioned their listing and they admitted the error and delilsted us immediately.  However, whilst AT&T saw the listing drop and restored our normal flow almost immediately, MS-owned domains were much slower to respond.  We've been reaching out daily via online means to follow-up with MS and they have been (slowly) releasing the throttles.  We've confirmed this by seeing improvement in the email deliverability to those domains.

Philip Nawrocki

Thanks for the replies! I appreciate them.


Obviously we will continue to monitor and I have a large e-mail send coming up next week.


I will share what we are seeing from our side after that send.


Thanks,


Phil

Megan Vandekerckhove

This is what I have received from BB RE: the spam issue:

Unfortunately our engineers have identified this as an issue with the system on the newest version of Spam Assassin. They are working on a resolution and I will contact you when I have more information regarding a potential release date for that fix.

John Alan

That's from the product side.  Unfortunately, I have no visibility into that - I can speak to the deliverability side.  Glad they're working on it for you!

Jessica Sotelo

Wouldn't it be nice if there were an email delivery status page, much like https://status.blackbaud.com/ ? And email notification of issues like this?


I've added this suggestion into the Luminate Ideas Portal - please vote for it: https://luminateonline.ideas.aha.io/ideas/LUM-I-1412

Bob DuVall

We have been experiencing similar issues. We have an email that goes out to the same list every Monday morning and the soft bounce rate has grown from 1% in December to 3-5% over the last three months or so. This morning's email had a soft bounce rate of 3%. With our eAppeals, we have seen soft bounce rates as high as 8% early this month. Our eAppeal on May 18 had a soft bounce rate of 5%. The next day we sent an eAppeal to a similar list and had a soft bounce rate of 3%. Our BB case number is 14148776.

Philip Nawrocki

So we are still experiencing this. @John Alan, how did you identify the you were listed by SPAMhaus?


Thanks,


Phil

John Alan

I receive an email directly from SpamHaus (or SpamCop) telling me.  Typically it's very vague and I need to go back to them asking for more details (email headers) which, in most cases, they will provide albeit redacted.  From that I can glean enough info to determine which client is the offender and have Support reach out to them to arrange a call with me and their TAM that same day.


The site then needs to provide me a list of what steps they have taken/will be taking as quickly as possible to eliminate the trap from their list/s and I report that back to SpamHaus/SpamCop as part of my request for delisting.

Gwendolyn Chambers

John Alan:

I receive an email directly from SpamHaus (or SpamCop) telling me.  Typically it's very vague and I need to go back to them asking for more details (email headers) which, in most cases, they will provide albeit redacted.  From that I can glean enough info to determine which client is the offender and have Support reach out to them to arrange a call with me and their TAM that same day.


The site then needs to provide me a list of what steps they have taken/will be taking as quickly as possible to eliminate the trap from their list/s and I report that back to SpamHaus/SpamCop as part of my request for delisting.

We're experiencing the same issue. In the last two months, our soft bounce rate has jumped up to 3 and sometimes 5%. For us AOL and Yahoo have the biggest soft bounce numbers with Hotmail in a close third. 

Is contacting SpamHaus the best way to remedy? Or is this the work of Oath's new privacy policy? 

John Alan

We work with Spamhaus as soon as we are notified. 


Of note:  This week I had an exchange with them in which they let slip that they actually actively seek out sites that do not have properly secured (read:  double opt-in, reCAPTCHA, COI) and purposefully sign-up their trap addresses.  Think of this as a corporation that hires a white hat hacker to test their network for vulnerabilities - it's the same thing here.  Spamhaus is testing sites across the web for vulnerabilities and seeding them with their trap addresses.  If the trap addresses aren't purge from the site's list/s by way of aggressive list hygiene habits then Spamhaus lists the site and our IP on their blacklist. 


I strongly urge all of our clients to give a hard look at both their list hygiene habits as well as any forms, sign-up pages, pledge pages, etc. that don't utilizy double opt-in, reCAPTCHA, COI and take steps to add one or more of those means asap.  With the advent of GDPR it's looking like high-priority blacklisters like Spamhaus and SpamCop are stepping up their "testing" as well.

Sarah Robie

John Alan:

We work with Spamhaus as soon as we are notified. 


Of note:  This week I had an exchange with them in which they let slip that they actually actively seek out sites that do not have properly secured (read:  double opt-in, reCAPTCHA, COI) and purposefully sign-up their trap addresses.  Think of this as a corporation that hires a white hat hacker to test their network for vulnerabilities - it's the same thing here.  Spamhaus is testing sites across the web for vulnerabilities and seeding them with their trap addresses.  If the trap addresses aren't purge from the site's list/s by way of aggressive list hygiene habits then Spamhaus lists the site and our IP on their blacklist. 


I strongly urge all of our clients to give a hard look at both their list hygiene habits as well as any forms, sign-up pages, pledge pages, etc. that don't utilizy double opt-in, reCAPTCHA, COI and take steps to add one or more of those means asap.  With the advent of GDPR it's looking like high-priority blacklisters like Spamhaus and SpamCop are stepping up their "testing" as well.

This new development is concerning, as it sounds like one client's email acquisition tactics can affect the email deliverability of all other organizations. What will Blackbaud's next move be to ensure that clients are adhering to best practices for acquiring email addresses? How else can we or Blackbaud work to prevent major blacklisters from flagging our IP address?


We've also noticed a sharp uptick in soft bounces for our email sends, dominated by hotmail and aol. At its worst yesterday, our delivery rate was 91%, meaning tens of thousands of emails were recorded as soft bounces.

Laura Lofgren

Sarah Robie:

John Alan:

We work with Spamhaus as soon as we are notified. 


Of note:  This week I had an exchange with them in which they let slip that they actually actively seek out sites that do not have properly secured (read:  double opt-in, reCAPTCHA, COI) and purposefully sign-up their trap addresses.  Think of this as a corporation that hires a white hat hacker to test their network for vulnerabilities - it's the same thing here.  Spamhaus is testing sites across the web for vulnerabilities and seeding them with their trap addresses.  If the trap addresses aren't purge from the site's list/s by way of aggressive list hygiene habits then Spamhaus lists the site and our IP on their blacklist. 


I strongly urge all of our clients to give a hard look at both their list hygiene habits as well as any forms, sign-up pages, pledge pages, etc. that don't utilizy double opt-in, reCAPTCHA, COI and take steps to add one or more of those means asap.  With the advent of GDPR it's looking like high-priority blacklisters like Spamhaus and SpamCop are stepping up their "testing" as well.

This new development is concerning, as it sounds like one client's email acquisition tactics can affect the email deliverability of all other organizations. What will Blackbaud's next move be to ensure that clients are adhering to best practices for acquiring email addresses? How else can we or Blackbaud work to prevent major blacklisters from flagging our IP address?


We've also noticed a sharp uptick in soft bounces for our email sends, dominated by hotmail and aol. At its worst yesterday, our delivery rate was 91%, meaning tens of thousands of emails were recorded as soft bounces.

 

We have explored both reCAPTCHA and COI with Luminate Online. LO doesn't have any real documentation on how to set up COI, and the reCAPTCHA they have built into their survey builder is so extremely outdated and unusable, since phones automatically capitalize the first letter without the user realizing, forcing the CAPTCHA to throw an error. Blackbaud should make it a priority to build an up-to-date reCAPTCHA for their surveys so that we can put these on our forms to make them more secure and help mitigate this delivery issue. (Without forcing us to create pagebuilder pages and manually work in the reCAPTCHA code for every sign up form - we shouldn't have to do that).


Our soft bounce rate has been quite high for the past six months, but this past week we saw an extremely sharp increase, with several of our emails at a 20% to 40% soft bounce rate. If this is happening to everyone, why isn't Blackbaud communicating about it better and helping us with solutions to resolve this issue?


 

Bob DuVall

We have also seen an extremely high increase in soft bounce rate in just the last few days. An email we sent Saturday had a 21% soft bounce rate and Monday morning we had a 23% soft bounce rate.

Philip Nawrocki

Everyone on here is exactly right.


I just received an update on my case:

"I heard back from our internal team on your email send. They are reporting that we were erroneously listed by SpamHaus and this caused a lot of issues with email deliverability due to a spike in bounces. We have found that IP blocking from Microsoft owned domains has spiked across the board. We've been informed that many clients are experiencing these blocks and that it is likely due to the upcoming GDPR which went into effect on 5/25/2018.


Companies that do business in Europe, like Microsoft, are subject to the new regulations. It is believed that most companies that are subject to the new rules will not try to maintain two systems that follow two sets of standards but, instead, follow the stricter one. I can assure you our teams are in regular communication with Microsoft and will be providing additional information via support cases and as well as a blog post."


Support just wanted to close the case then.


My reply:

"This seems more like an explanation to the issue instead of a solution, which I was able to obtain from the Community. How can this case be closed when there is no resolution? Will this support case be updated when a fix is implemented? How will I be notified of this Blog Post and when will it be posted? Is there any timetable for a resolution?


If many clients are experiencing this, how come this is not being communicated by Blackbaud? This should be on status.blackbaud.com as an issue since it is affecting so many clients. This is our main vehicle(and many other orgs') to reach constituents to get them to donate, join an event or be informed about our org. Having these constituents not be able to receive our e-mails is very frustrating. It's not like this was some new thing that came up yesterday. GDPR has been talked about for a long time. Blackbaud was aware of this and even has an entire microsite(https://www.blackbaud.com/general-data-protection-regulation#communicationPreference) dedicated to making sure we set up our side correctly.


It is disappointing that the resolution to this is just to close the case like nothing is happening."


So the list of affected orgs keeps growing, but no urgency....

Jessica Sotelo

John Alan:

We work with Spamhaus as soon as we are notified. 


Of note:  This week I had an exchange with them in which they let slip that they actually actively seek out sites that do not have properly secured (read:  double opt-in, reCAPTCHA, COI) and purposefully sign-up their trap addresses.  Think of this as a corporation that hires a white hat hacker to test their network for vulnerabilities - it's the same thing here.  Spamhaus is testing sites across the web for vulnerabilities and seeding them with their trap addresses.  If the trap addresses aren't purge from the site's list/s by way of aggressive list hygiene habits then Spamhaus lists the site and our IP on their blacklist. 


I strongly urge all of our clients to give a hard look at both their list hygiene habits as well as any forms, sign-up pages, pledge pages, etc. that don't utilizy double opt-in, reCAPTCHA, COI and take steps to add one or more of those means asap.  With the advent of GDPR it's looking like high-priority blacklisters like Spamhaus and SpamCop are stepping up their "testing" as well.

John, can you please share your title and role at Blackbaud?


What internal discussions are taking place? As a large percentage of Blackbaud's clients' emailable files are now erroneously marked as soft/hard bounce, how will Blackbaud resolve this? We need assurance that this issue is of utmost priority.

Sarah Robie

Has anyone implemented any short-term solutions until the issue is resolved by Blackbaud? The best we could formulate is to suppress all Hotmail and AOL supporters, since we noticed nearly half of these email addresses were marked with a soft bounce designation in the past few days. We obviously don't want to risk losing them all to hard bounces after three soft bounces are recorded. Thanks!

Kim Ethridge

One option to consider for cleaning lists and keeping them clean are email validation services. Good info at https://www.accuwebhosting.com/blog/top-10-bulk-email-list-verification-validation-services-compared/


Other useful tools for monitoring include https://www.unlocktheinbox.com/ , especially https://www.unlocktheinbox.com/services/inboxtester/ , and https://www.zerobounce.net/guide-to-improve-inbox-and-delivery.html

Maria Shanley

We are seeing the same thing. What do you currently do with your soft bounce emails? We track engagement factors.. open, received and click through. I have almost 1,500 emails of constituents that have been engaged with us who all of the sudden now have soft bounce emails.


I've been debating reaching out to them again with another email. Should i wait and see if this gets resolved? 


All I was told in my support case is that "The responses our server received from the soft bounces were mostly spam reports. "


Thank goodness that it's not the fall!


Maria

Kathryn Hall

John, can you please share your title and role at Blackbaud?


What internal discussions are taking place? As a large percentage of Blackbaud's clients' emailable files are now erroneously marked as soft/hard bounce, how will Blackbaud resolve this? We need assurance that this issue is of utmost priority

Jessica, technically John's title is Team Lead, Operations Engineering. His role essentially is serving as the customer and industry advocate within Blackbaud for all things email. 

Samantha McGuin

Jessica Sotelo:

John, can you please share your title and role at Blackbaud?


What internal discussions are taking place? As a large percentage of Blackbaud's clients' emailable files are now erroneously marked as soft/hard bounce, how will Blackbaud resolve this? We need assurance that this issue is of utmost priority.

 

Hi Jessica and all,

I can jump in here in John's absence - we sent him on a much-needed vacation and he is hopefully not checking his emails. First, let me introduce myself. My name is Sam McGuin, I'm a Principal Product Manager at Blackbaud and I oversee our Email Service. I work closely with other product managers, including Luminate Online's PM, around email delivery and deliverability. While I am not an LO product expert, I do deal with email delivery and email deliverability on a daily basis.


First of all, LO will continue to send to soft bounces. If you include these addresses in future sends, delivery will still be attempted.

What is Blackbaud doing and are we making this a priority? Absolutely this is a priority – we’ve even put together a task force on this. While we are still finalizing our findings and plan, what I can tell you is that all signs are pointing to spam trap hits and engagement. Microsoft properties have gotten very serious about your list hygiene and are making delivery decisions because of it. As John said, we are going to need all clients to pay attention and help with this – we are all in this together. List hygiene, particularly segmenting your lists for engagement and to drop out spam trap addresses, is rising to the top as the key to improving deliverability for Microsoft properties. Things everyone can start to do today include:

• Start or continue to use engagement factors to segment your lists to recipients who have engaged with your email in the past 12 months, at a maximum (6 months is recommended and some blacklists require you to go to 90 days in order to delist.)
• Make sure your forms use reCAPTCHA to stop listbombing attempts.
• Implement COI/double opt-in for new email addresses, and/or ensure you can prove that you have explicit consent to email to every recipient on your list.

Stay tuned for more information coming out via blog posts and other channels.


Samantha McGuin

Principal Product Manager

samantha.mcguin@blackbaud.com