550 This message was classified as SPAM and may not be delivered
This means that something in the email content or the way the email is being sent triggered our spam filter. When you send an email from your hosting account, it must pass our outbound spam filters before it is delivered to your recipient. Our outbound spam filters have a very low false-positive rate, which means that they rarely block legitimate emails. Here are a few common tips to help avoid this error:
Our outbound email servers use a spam evaluation process that is set moderately low. This means it is unlikely for your emails to be classified as spam and prevented from reaching your recipient unless they have multiple ‘spam’ characteristics. If you are still getting blocked by the spam filter, you will want to evaluate both the subject line and body content of your email.
$$$ 100% Act now Action Additional income Affordable All natural/new Amazed Apply now Avoid Be amazed/your own boss Beneficiary Billing Billion Bonus Boss Buy Call free/now Cancel Cash Casino Certified Cheap Click here Clearance Collect Compare rates Congratulations Credit card/check/offers Cures Deal Dear friend/somebody Debt Discount Direct email Don't delete/hesitate Double your income/cash Earn Extra Expire Fantastic Free access/money/gift Freedom Friend Get it now/started/paid Great Guarantee Hello Income Increase sales/traffic Instant Investment Junk Limited Lose Lowest price Luxury Make $/money Medicine Money Name No credit check/experience Now Obligation Offer Only Open Order now Please Presently Problem Promise Purchase Quote Rates Refinance Refund Remove Request Risk-free Sales Satisfaction Save Score Serious Spam Success Supplies Take action Terms Traffic Trial Unlimited Urgent Weight While supplies last Win Winner
In addition to excluding these words from your email subject lines, there are a few other things you can do to limit the chance that your email will be picked up by spam filters.
E-mails sent through Outlook tend to cause e-mail messages to score higher than normal, causing e-mails that otherwise would be allowed through to be classified as spam. This is commonly caused by not having SMTP Authentication enabled in Outlook. You need to make sure SMTP authentication is enabled in Outlook and the username is your full email address along with the password for your email account.
If you have worked with the other solutions above and are still having issues with your emails getting classified as spam, you will want to contact our Technical Support department. Simply forward the failed email, complete with the bounceback-headers to the Support team and they will be able to test the email against their filters and find which rules were violated. You can also submit your return email as a ticket via the customer portal.
We have customizable spam filtering tools already in place for each account that evaluates incoming emails. Outbound SPAM filtering is a process where all outgoing emails are checked as to the likelihood of the message being spam. This is not customizable on an account level and is handled by your hosting server. It checks for multiple characteristics and assigns points for any it finds. If the email reaches a certain level, it is classified as SPAM and not allowed to leave the server. If you are receiving a bounce-back with the error "550 This message was classified as SPAM and may not be delivered", then the email you sent has not passed the outbound filter.
Email to any recipient can always be determined to be spam based on content. The number of recipients for outbound emails is limited to 50, so it is not typically used as a criteria in determining whether an email is spam. The recipient field is only used as a criteria for allowing or disallowing emails when the recipient has been explicitly placed on a blacklist or whitelist. This can be done in Spam Assassin.
Outbound screening helps to preserve the reputation of our server's IP addresses. If an email server's IP gets enough spam complaints against it, it will be reported and blacklisted by a blacklisting service. Any email server that subscribes to that service will then block any mail coming in from that IP address. It is also possible that any emails coming from any of our servers will eventually be automatically delivered to spam folders, regardless of the IP address of the server. As most of our customers do legitimate business online, it would be unfair to allow our server IPs to be classified as spam because of a few abusers, hence the outbound spam evaluation.
