WordPress email notifications ending up in Gmail Spam folder

• 

  douglerner · Member · May 31, 2012 at 4:42 am

  • Copy link
  • Add topic to favorites

  I invited my sister to join my blog. She accepted the invitation and was very proud of herself for figuring it out.

  But she wasn’t getting my blog notifications (e.g. http://douglerner.wordpress.com/2012/05/31/to-have-and-have-not/).

  I checked and it was in her Gmail spam folder.

  I’m still thinking of switching from Posterous to WordPress because of all that’s going on with Posterous. But this could be a show-stopper. Do WordPress notifications often regularly end up in Gmail spam? My sister said she hasn’t received any of my notifications since she accepted the invitation, so I assume they all ended up in spam.

  Thanks,

  doug

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

• 

  thesacredpath · Member · May 31, 2012 at 5:11 am

  • Copy link

  This is an issue with the spam filter at gmail. You need to whitelist wordpress.com in the spam system on her account. Many spam filters are overly aggressive and the one at gmail is even worse.

• 

  douglerner · Member · May 31, 2012 at 5:32 am

  • Copy link

  The only non-spam mail in my sister’s spam box (out of a couple of hundred) are my WordPress notifications.

  :(

  I can whitelist this for my sister, but I can’t do it for everybody else.

  Agh. What to do.

  doug

• 

  thesacredpath · Member · May 31, 2012 at 5:48 am

  • Copy link

  I have to whitelist all my friends with gmail accounts since that is one of the origins of a lot of spam. No one with a gmail email address comes through to me without me whitelisting them, and about half of the people I know on Yahoo I’ve had to whitelist as well since Yahoo has been the source of a ton of spam. I’m a member of a group on a posterous site and I had to whitelist posterous because the notification emails were getting caught.

  This isn’t just wordpress.com that gets caught. Nearly everything I’ve signed up for as far as newsletters and such have a line in the sign up form that says make sure and whitelist thissite.com in your email system so that our emails do not get caught by your spam filter.

• 

  thesacredpath · Member · May 31, 2012 at 5:50 am

  • Copy link

  Welcome to the web where 92% of all comments made on sites are spam, and where 87% of all emails sent on the internet are spam.

• 

  douglerner · Member · May 31, 2012 at 7:12 am

  • Copy link

  I have to admit I’ve had different experiences than you. My sister, for example, has never had problems receiving my Posterous notifications.

  I have tons of spam coming to my primary mail address. But Gmail seems to sort it out ok.

  This is the first time in a long time something like this has happened. From my experience this often has to do with the way the sender (in this case WordPress.com) forms its headers, or sets its DNS records.

  doug

• 

  douglerner · Member · Jun 1, 2012 at 5:48 am

  • Copy link

  Well, this is not working well at all.

  I checked with another friend, and looked in his mail, and he’s getting notifications from me, but not all of them. Some are just missing.

  I guess I’ll try self-hosting and see if it’s any better.

  Oh well.

  Thanks,

  doug

• 

  douglerner · Member · Jun 6, 2012 at 9:59 am

  • Copy link

  I officially take back my claim that this problem is only with WordPress and never happens with Posterous.

  I just did a comprehensive search of my Gmail Spam folder and found 11 Posterous comment notifications in there that I never received.

  So my apologies to the people at WordPress.com.

  doug