Is it common for Barracuda to mark all Blackbaud-sent email as spam?

Nate Laning 2 · May 2015

Our Barracuda spam filter on our college campus began blocking registration confirmation emails sent through Online Express. We ended up whitelisting the domain of "blackbaudemail.netcommunity1.com." In the process, we discovered that other non-profits who use Blackbaud's services for email, also had their emails blocked in our filter when they were sent to people on our campus.

My concern is that this may be happening at other organizations where our alumni work, and we are unable to whitelist our address for those organizations.

The cause of the emails being flagged appeared to be odd: the use of the words "island," "confirmation," "alumni," etc. Nothing seems like an obvious spam-style word to me.

Is this a common problem? Could it be due to the fact that any organization using Blackbaud services has their emails come from the same Blackbaud domain?

Joe Patke · May 2015

Our On-Line Express e-mail is also being caught in our own spam filter. The message says that the site (some variation of blackbaud) is a "known malware" site. When we send a "test" message, to ourselves, or anyone on our staff, it always goes to spam.

We are also using a Barracuda spam filter.

This seems like a pretty serious matter?

Katie Jones · May 2015

We just sent our first BBOX yesterday and the same thing happened: the message went to the spam folder instead of inbox for the majority of our staff -- with the same message Joe mentions above (warning of "known malware"). Our email content was not very different than content of our previous Constant Contact emails, so I'm skeptical that it's our language choices that sent it to the spam filter for most people.

Overall open rate is less than half our average, so seems clear it's going to spam folders beyond our staff too.

Are others encountering this issue and are there any known workarounds?

Joe Patke · May 2015

Has anyone heard anything from Blackbaud about this? Seems like a pretty serious issue if a company the size and scope of Barracuda is flagging emails from Blackbaud.com as spam because it is a "known malware" website.

Katie Jones · May 2015

Not sure about the Barracuda issue, but this is what we're trying next:

https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Art...

Matthew Garbarino · May 2015

I did some digging into this issue to get some more information.

Blackbaud's high volume email servers are constantly being monitored to watch for delivery issues with major service providers. However, in the case of internal operations using tools like Barracuda, email responses can end up on blacklists.

The best course of action is to whitelist the BB sending IP addresses, as mentioned in Katie's post above.

Is it common for Barracuda to mark all Blackbaud-sent email as spam?

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