Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Google Gmail Barracuda Spam Report - Prevent Google marking you email as SPAM

If you find that your website is sending legitimate mail is marked as SPAM, I have a solution for you.

Problem Statement: 

A client's site used PHP mailer program (http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpmailer/?source=dlp) had been set-up to perform standard website communications with a web-user, such as sending confirmation emails for membership sign-ups and contact forms. However, Google's was reporting that emails sent from the site where reported as SPAM in Google Gmail.

Detail:

Google uses Barracuda Spam Filter  and allows for custom rules that are set by the individual company so there is little documentation concerning them. 
So BSF_SC0 denote custom rules, some are easier to decipher than others. There's no documentation about these rules or else Spammers could get around them.
An example of the SPAM report is shown below:
Sample Google Email SPAM report



X-Mailer: PHPMailer [version 1.73]
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Content-Type: text/html; charset="UTF-8"
X-Barracuda-Connect: {your server}
X-Barracuda-Start-Time: 1360037921
X-Barracuda-URL: http://6{your server}/cgi-mod/mailer.cgi
X-Virus-Scanned: 
X-Barracuda-BRTS-Status: 1
X-Barracuda-Spam-Score: 1.57
X-Barracuda-Spam-Status: No, SCORE=1.57 using global scores of TAG_LEVEL=1000.0 QUARANTINE_LEVEL=1000.0 KILL_LEVEL=3.5 tests=BSF_SC0_MISMATCH_TO, BSF_SC0_SA620b, BSF_SC0_SA_TO_FROM_DOMAIN_MATCH, HTML_MESSAGE, HTML_MIME_NO_HTML_TAG, MAILTO_TO_SPAM_ADDR, MIME_HTML_ONLY
X-Barracuda-Spam-Report: Code version 3.2, rules version 3.2.2.121844
 Rule breakdown below
  pts rule name              description
 ---- ---------------------- --------------------------------------------------
 0.00 BSF_SC0_MISMATCH_TO    Envelope rcpt doesn't match header
 0.00 MAILTO_TO_SPAM_ADDR    URI: Includes a link to a likely spammer email
 0.00 MIME_HTML_ONLY         BODY: Message only has text/html MIME parts
 0.00 HTML_MESSAGE           BODY: HTML included in message
 1.05 HTML_MIME_NO_HTML_TAG  HTML-only message, but there is no HTML tag
 0.50 BSF_SC0_SA620b         Custom Rule SA620b
 0.01 BSF_SC0_SA_TO_FROM_DOMAIN_MATCH Sender Domain Matches Recipient
                            Domain


Solution:
I developed a solution to get around these errors. This can be used for any website emailer program, but primarily for PHP based solutions such as Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla!, etc.

If you need to solve these issues, contact me for a consultation.

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