Preventing Magento Spam Emails

Question

I'd been testing a Magento site on my server standalone using sendmail, as well as with certain SMTP providers. What I've found when using Magento standalone is that the emails get a low spam rating from spamassassin, mainly for two reasons:

1. Emails are sent without a plain text version of the html
2. STYLE_GIBBERISH, nonsense found in html

I'm not sure how exactly to get past these two issues. I had found an old post on the Magento forums in Google's cache suggesting that Magento was aware of the plain text issue with email sends, but I couldn't find any information on if it was ever addressed or how to actually get past the issue. I'm also not sure what's causing the STYLE_GIBBERISH flag to get thrown for the html (when I send emails through SMTP providers like Google Apps or Mandrill, that error doesn't get thrown).

For clarification, my MTA is sendmail, the webserver is Apache, running on an Amazon Linux instance (which is basically CentOS).

Any help or thoughts on addressing the problem would be greatly appreciated, thanks very much!

Answer 1

This is what we researched for one of our presentations for Meet Magento conference: https://blog.amasty.com/5-steps-for-no-spam-e-mails-in-magento/

The major impact of the SPAM score is affected by the following issues in Magento e-mail sending code/logic:

1. No plain text MIME part
2. Too long Quote-Printable line length

This is being fixed by a free tool available at the end of this presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/meetmagento/andrei-vashkievich-5-steps-for-nospam-emails-in-magento (page #38)

Additionally there are many other points to pay attention to, like correct server configuration, DNS records and e-mail structure.