If you are sending emails from an IAM email account and you get a message back to say that your message has been delayed or failed (see samples below) because Google thinks you are sending SPAM it could be caused by two things:
1. you might have sent an email to a gmail address (gmail accounts don’t necessary end in @gmail.com – often you cannot tell)
2. you might have written to one of the 21 people who’s IAM accounts currently forward all email to their gmail accounts
The real cause of this problem is that because there are 21 people who send all their email to gmail, when they identify an email as SPAM gmail blames IAM as the SPAM source since we forwarded the message to gmail, when in reality the SPAM came from somewhere else and that source should actually be blamed.
IAMtech been researching this problem and in order to solve it we will be stopping all automated email forwarding from IAM’s email server to any other server (forwarding between accounts on IAM’s server will still be permitted). The same problem that happens with gmail has a potential to happen with yahoo mail and also outlook.com/hotmail.com. By stopping all automated forwarding it will protect the reputation of our mail server and gmail will stop identifying us as SPAMmers.
This is what our hosting company had to say about the problem:
Unfortunately, it is very common for forwarding to cause blacklisting with many large email providers. This most commonly occurs when large amounts of mail are forwarded and then marked as spam after it has been received in the end user's inbox. This results in your server's sending reputation being penalized since it was the last server to send the mail. Ultimately, your server will become blacklisted with the email provider and it will affect all of the users on the server.
This will mean that people who are currently forwarding mail will need to find new ways to get their mail but there are a number of acceptable alternatives that they can use and we will work with each of them to offer the appropriate options and help them to change to that method.
We anticipate that by August this problem should be resolved. In the meantime, can you do anything about it? No. But IAMtech is making changes to fix this for you. In the meantime you might want to try resending the message from your personal email account.
Thanks for your patience.
Sample mail delivery error messages:
1. Mail delivery failed
Subject: Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender
This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.
A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:
emailaddress.removed.com
SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:
host aspmx5.googlemail.com [173.194.78.26]: 421-4.7.0 [50.87.144.101 15] Our system has detected an unusual rate of
421-4.7.0 unsolicited mail originating from your IP address. To protect our
421-4.7.0 users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has been temporarily
421-4.7.0 rate limited. Please visit
421-4.7.0 http://www.google.com/mail/help/bulk_mail.html to review our Bulk
421 4.7.0 Email Senders Guidelines. fi1si31656932wib.89 - gsmtp:
retry timeout exceeded
2. Mail delivery delayed
Subject: Warning: message 1Wqb0r-0006M5-Km delayed 24 hours This message was created automatically by mail delivery software. A message that you sent has not yet been delivered to one or more of its recipients after more than 24 hours on the queue on gator2001.hostgator.com. The message identifier is: 1Wqb0r-0006M5-Km The subject of the message is: =?utf-8?Q?Re:_removed?= The date of the message is: Sat, 31 May 2014 04:34:49 +0000 The address to which the message has not yet been delivered is: emailaddress.removed.com (ultimately generated from address@iam-afghanistan.org) Delay reason: SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data: host alt2.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com [173.194.68.26]: 421-4.7.0 [50.87.144.101 15] Our system has detected an unusual rate of 421-4.7.0 unsolicited mail originating from your IP address. To protect our 421-4.7.0 users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has been temporarily 421-4.7.0 rate limited. Please visit 421-4.7.0 http://www.google.com/mail/help/bulk_mail.html to review our Bulk 421 4.7.0 Email Senders Guidelines. a3si12959895qaa.35 - gsmtp No action is required on your part. Delivery attempts will continue for some time, and this warning may be repeated at intervals if the message remains undelivered. Eventually the mail delivery software will give up, and when that happens, the message will be returned to you.