Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else

I am just having this problem. Actually getting SPF, DKIM and DMARC right and having a domain with a 0 spam score will still land you in the spam directory. It turns out, you need to have a "reputation"? before your email gets accepted into gmail. My head was spinning as to how that reputation will be built if your email just goes straight to spam.

But sure, Linkedin emails are definitively not spam and their dark-patterns at adding you at n+1 emailing list doesn't get them banned from the big (or any?) provider.

It's easy, you just have to have a regular, decently sized volume of non-spam emails, and suddenly your email stops being marked as spam!

The logic isn't even that bad. SPF and DKIM serve to prove to the email who the sender is. That doesn't mean much if the sender is a spammer. Verifying identity claims is only the first part in checking email for spam, the harder part is checking if that identity is someone you trust.

When you email Outlook or Google, you're better sending more than a few every single day, and the recipient better manually drag those emails from their spam folders to their inbox, or they're all being learned as spam.

> It's easy, you just have to have a regular, decently sized volume of non-spam emails, and suddenly your email stops being marked as spam!

The domain is new and didn't send a single email until I tested it.

Edit: The domain is actually a bit old but was parked/inactive for a while, though the email was used only for receiving.

Yup, that'll get you stuck in spam limbo alright. Good luck climbing out if it if you're initiating conversations with anyone on Gmail or Outlook (or, even worse, corporate Outlook).

Those email services will usually have no trouble with replies to emails sent from their service, so if you get someone to email you first you'll save them the trouble of dragging your email from their spam folder to their inbox.

With Outlook, in my university the problem was that when we send emails they disappeared mid air, no bounce, no spam folder. The solution was that they must write an email from the Outlook address, after that we are added to a secret good list and we can write them.

I've had to figure out a problem with reaching university Outlook servers where the Outlook server didn't like the (spec compliant) way my email server was writing the From address and rewrote it halfway through the spam filtering chain.

Then it checked the DKIM signature on the message it REWROTE ON ITS OWN and decided that the signature didn't match, and rejected my email.

Corporate email stacks are hell.

Do you have a write-up of this, anywhere? I'd appreciate the details (what format did it reject? what did it change it to? what version of Exchange?).