Invoice emails to clients marked spam and "Suspicious link" warning messages

Self-Hosted | v4/Legacy
21

So this may be the issue,

You are sending from @domain.com but the view link is invoice.domain.com, this may be confusing Google / spam filters that you are impersonating @domain.com but sending users to invoice.domain.com

I am sure this is why you are getting the phishing warnings.

Send through an email with headers to [email protected] and i’ll have a look also, but I think we are on the right track now.

22
You are sending from @domain.com but the view link is invoice.domain.com

It should work this way since it’s the same domain, also I had the same setup with invoice.MyDomain.com sending from Mydomain.com wiout any problem.

Another thing I can see is that your IP address are blacklisted on spam list, you cold check it here to see

Here’s my result, since I use shared hosting I’m on 2 blacklist but right now it does not affect me but I work with my hosting company to be delisted from those list.

Use this test to see if you are a major spam list and your IP is blacklisted.

Have you tried all the tools/lockup from Network Tools: DNS,IP,Email ? ?

Try them they are really powerful to find why emails are flagged as spam.

Regards

23

I want to first thank everyone for their help and advice with this problem. I will admit I’ve learned a lot while troubleshooting this issue.

I have identified the trigger for this which is in the email design/template selected in IN. If Light or Dark is selected, the messages are:

  • Marked as spam
  • not delivered to inbox
  • clicking any link, invluding view button shows "untrusted/suspicious" warning message, even after clicking 'Not spam' and 'Report as not phishing' from dropdown menu

    • If the Light theme is selected the messages are Not marked as spam, are delivered to the inbox, and clicking any/all links show no warnings of any kind.

    What’s strange is that copy/paste all content of either Light/Dark themes and re-sending from email client using same user and same SMTP settings/servers does not cause the spam and warning messages.

    I have used MXToolbox’s Supertool to check my domain and everything checks out. In the past week there have been times where my IP has been on 1 or 2 blacklists (out of many), but today that is not the case. This IP in question is not mine and belongs to Google as I am using their SMTP servers. I receive somewhere between an 8.5 and 9.5 out of 10 score on Mail-Tester.com. The negative points stem from things out of my control always and do not have anything to do with SPF DKIM or DMARC, as all of those are setup and verified to be valid.
    I am referring to mail-tester saying “your message could be improved” - I believe this refers to the low amount of text in the message.
    “2 broken links” - [591 - Error : Url not formatted properly] //fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans:300,700,900,100|Open+Sans:400,700,900,100 and
    “redirection found” - [302 - Redirection : Found] https://invoice.mydomain.com/view/keupajtjdtjvkf57bce4k404l7atnzdr

    I can go into my IN settings and switch back and forth between Themes and re-send invoices from each, and each time the messages are delivered according to the description/detail above. This is also not a browser caching issue because it doesn’t matter if new private windows are opened and the messages that are flagged stay flagged (ie. the warnings will still show after mail has come from the same address, marked not spam, etc., even days, weeks later - the same is true for Light themed mail that is delivered normally).

24

I’m sorry, I made a mistake above (can’t edit that one): Light/Dark themes = spam | Plain theme = not spam

To follow up on that… So what’s different about the Light/Dark themes that could be causing this? Without getting into the HTML part yet, what jumps out at me is the display of a logo and a link in the footer of the email, which appears to come from the same place as the logo URL.

Is this info coming from what is in the Settings > Company Details?

I have Settings > System Settings > URL set to: https://invoice.mydomain.com and HTTPS Require is checked. In Settings > Company Details > Website I have: mydomain.com

Also, if you click the question mark next to the Email Styles chooser in Settings > Email Settings a preview of each of the 3 styles is shown. The Plain emails show without a $viewButton and link only. In mine, Plain emails are still delivered with a $viewButton shown. The rest of emails look like preview. This leads me to further believe that it is not the redirection of the $viewButton (ie. negative points with mail-tester.com) and more likely has to do with the other links/logo image. Is that a fair assumption?

25

One thing you could do to see exactly what trigger the spam filter is to copy the the source of the email (light of black) in another email sent with the same SMPT server that Invoice Ninja use and remove/modify slowly things in the source code to see exactly what is triggering the spam filter.

Regards :slight_smile:

26

Here’s 2 more ressources I discovered to help to troubleshoot why email goes in the spam folder.

https://glockapps.com/ is one of the best tool I used up to now but you have only 3 scan for free but you will know exactly which server put your mail in the spam folder after you have to pay.

https://postmaster.google.com to help you to know why Google classify you email as spam.

27

So it’s been a week and I would like to give an update for any others having this issue.

I am happy to say that I have sent more than two dozen emails now with 100% success rate — no spam! However, I am forced to use the Plain email template only, so I am certainly not calling this a win or an acceptable solution.

I have spent a great deal of time troubleshooting this issue and learned a lot. Since my last post I have successfully:

  • re-added an email signature with links
  • Changed invoice and reminder emails, including using many of the available variables (eg. $paymentButton etc.)
  • added an http link to myaccount.mydomain.com which redirects to my longer https://invoice.mydomain.com/client/login and not a single message has been marked as spam, no warnings about untrusted sites, or anything else
I am still receiving the same score from Mail-Tester.com as I did on the very first failed message and my post here. My SPF and DKIM records are the same. I did add DMARC following the guide at Postmark and have been receiving weekly reports from them, but that did not change my score and other tools like MXToolbox and Google's Postmaster Tools etc. all say the same thing they did from day one - PASS!

If I go into IN settings and change the Email Theme to Light or Dark, then send an invoice using any template (ie. Initial, First Reminder…, etc.) to a test client I configured with 4 contacts, 3 of which are Gmail/Gsuite addresses, all 3 are flagged as spam and not delivered to inbox with all of the red flags, warnings, etc. discussed throughout this thread. Change the theme back to Plain and resend and boom — they land in inbox and clicking links and all the rest is good. At the same time I can say that it’s not a browser cache issue or anything like that because messages that were previously flagged remain flagged and show all warnings regardless of a message sent 2 minutes later being totally fine.

I will continue to monitor and update… I have spent way too much time on this for now though and must just admit defeat and settle for not using the great looking themes, which is a major bummer :frowning:

28

That’s interesting to know, thanks for your help debugging!

Maybe other users have used the app to spend spam with the themes causing filters to pick up on them?