Magento 1.9.4
Let me first define the terms so that we are on the same page as it’s vital to mention that Email deliverability isn’t the same as a delivery rate.
A delivery rate indicates what percentage of your Emails is received by subscribers’ mailboxes, even if they land in the SPAM folder. Meanwhile, deliverability is the inbox placing indicator:
Email deliverability is the ability to deliver emails to recipients’ inboxes.
Just to be clear - we are not having problems with the delivery rate but rather with Email deliverability:
We have had this problem now for many months where customer places an order, the Order Confirmation Email is sent and it does not reach their Inbox at all. Most often it ends up in customer's SPAM folder which they don't check and this results in customers calling us on the phone and/or cancelling their order/bad reviews.
We were initially set up on our own server (with a hosting company) for sending Email with our own dedicated IP. We then switched to Sendgrid (in hopes of making things better) where we set up with our own IP again for sending Emails (we do not send any Email campaigns out of that Sendgrid account). The problem is really bad even now with Sendgrid. We set just about everything we could up to help with this:
- Domain authentication
- reverse DNS
- SPF and DKIM
The Sendgrid Technical Support says this:
"All of the technical aspects of your account setup are indeed working as expected."
Sendgrid tells us that they do not have any records of what happens to a message after handing it off to the recipient server and once they get that accepted message from that server, their job in the mail pipeline is complete.
Furthermore, Sengrid says:
"...there is nothing more that we can do about this issue. Everything in your account is setup correctly from a technical standpoint. You need to reach out to your recipients and ask them to check their entire inbox. Especially when it comes to Gmail as they have default filters set in place that will filter emails into different views. Did you ask this customer if they checked their spam box or any of the default filters that are setup in Gmail such as the promotions tab? It is very likely that the message ended up in somewhere in one of those filters."
"...I also wanted to suggest possibly moving back to the essentials plans. The only reason I wanted to bring this up is the reason you are seeing these messages landing in Spam might be because your daily sending volume might not be high enough to support a consistent sending reputation. And recipient servers can be very strict if they receive mail from an IP address that they don't have a lot of metrics on."
I am certain that moving back to a shared IP will not fix this because we were on this plan with them before we got our own IP address from them and were experiencing these same problems. (full disclosure - our sending volume is low = maybe 40 Emails/day including the order confirmation Emails)
We never ever sent any spam and this is really frustrating for us because we really loose orders because of the Email deliverability issue. Are there any solutions or even services (companies) you can recommend to deal with this problem?
