Email providers sometimes flag a forum's emails as suspicious or phishing. The cause is almost always a mismatch between your domain name and the domain names used inside the email. This article lists the settings that align your forum's emails with your own domain so they pass security checks.
Align every part of the email with your domain
Mail security systems, including Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, compare several parts of an email against your domain. When any one of them points to a different domain, the message can be flagged. Work through these settings to align all of them.
- Connect your forum's domain name. This makes every link in your emails, including the unsubscribe link, use your own domain instead of a default Website Toolbox address. See How to connect your domain to your forum.
- Connect your email. The step-by-step process sets up your outgoing email address, your returned email address, and verifies your domain with your email providers, so that every part of the email uses your own domain. See Connect your email.
If a recipient's email system still holds the messages
If a recipient cannot find your forum's emails, their email system may be holding the messages in a quarantine instead of delivering them to the inbox or the spam folder. Check your forum's email history to see the status on our end. If an email shows as sent successfully but the recipient cannot find it, it is likely sitting in their quarantine. Ask the recipient's IT administrator to check the quarantine for your forum's emails. See Checking the email quarantine on popular email systems for instructions on Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Proofpoint, Mimecast, and Barracuda.
See also Emails go into the spam folder, Removing Gmail's untrusted site / suspicious link message, and Reducing the returned or spam email rate.
If you have checked all of the settings above and your emails are still being flagged, contact us and include a copy of the message header from one of the flagged emails.