Best practice forum (Archived)

E-mail messages sent from Totara being blocked as SPAM

Hello,

I am having an issue with e-mail messages being marked as spam from various e-mail clients. Specifically, these messages are generated from an appraisal with reminders/updates as we move through the appraisal stages. Virtually all of them are being blocked as spam by Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. It appears as though the e-mails are totally blocked, not even going to a spam or quarantine folder.

Message from Gmail:

SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:

host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com [74.125.193.27]:

550-5.7.1 [174.47.181.228 12] Our system has detected that this message is

550-5.7.1 likely unsolicited mail. To reduce the amount of spam sent to Gmail,

550-5.7.1 this message has been blocked. Please visit

550 5.7.1 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/188131 for more information. s100si14947840ioe.52 - gsmtp

Message from Yahoo:

SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:

host mta5.am0.yahoodns.net [66.196.118.34]: 554 5.7.9 Message not accepted for policy reasons. See http://postmaster.yahoo.com/errors/postmaster-28.html

Has anyone else had this issue? How did you resolve it?

Thanks,
Jessica

Permalink | Reply

Hi Jessica. I also PM'd you, but for the benefit of the community I'll put the short version. In my experience this is often caused by a combination of settings. If you set Email Addresses in the support contact page at Site administration / ▶ Server / ▶ Support contact, then many of Totara's functionalities will attempt to send email as that email address. The problem is that often times, the IP address/server where the LMS is running is not permitted to send email on behalf of the domain set within those settings. Those permissions/policies are typically managed with DMARC (domain keys and SPF policies).

I would suggest enabling the setting at Site administration / ▶ Plugins / ▶ Message outputs / ▶ Email to "always send email from the no-reply address" (this recommendation is under the assumption that the no-reply email address IS permitted per DMARC policy to send email from the server/ip-address where the LMS is running)

Jamie

Permalink | Show parent | Reply