Emails getting Quarantined

[bhb1991]

My company has been trying to get back into the digital marketing. While we have been mostly successful in terms of email open rate, we've recently discovered that many of our big time clients aren't getting the emails.

After some digging into the issue, we found that these clients were using Microsoft 365, which has been quarantining our emails. We aren't sure why this is happening, as any emails not sent from Hubspot get recieved. 

Is there some setting in Microsoft 365 that automatically quaratines emails from places like Hubspot? If so, how do you work around it?

Any relevant information would be helpful.

[STaylor7]

My peepz, it isn't HubSpot that is the problem with Microsoft 365 quarantine.  It is AmazonSES / Amazon (AWS) which is the backbone to HubSpot e-mails.  I ran into a similar situation with all AmazonSES e-mails starting to be quarantined at the Microsoft inboxes.  Microsoft has a SmartScreen filter software that is extremely aggressive.  With AmazonSES being so cheap it is attractive to spammers to use and abuse the shared IP pools.  I believe the filter is even able to flag dedicated IPs running behind Amazon servers.  Is an easy IP lookup when an e-mail comes in and check for the ISP / Organization "(https://whatismyipaddress.com/ip/158.247.18.249) Just do a quick search on "microsoft365 blocks all amazon ses emails" and you will soon realize it is a major problem. 

Good luck trying to get anywhere with Microsoft on the issue.  If you have to use HubSpot e-mail marketing I would advise you understand that you may have to monitor all your Microsoft contacts carefully and send them campaigns on another service that leverages SendGrid, MailGun, etc. and not Amazon SES.  IF you are on a shared IP pool it will seem odd that some go through and some don't and that is because each e-mail could be using a different IP and not just one for any given campaign.  If the SmartScreen filter hasn't flagged that IP yet it should go through.  IF you are on a dedicated IP pool initially it may go through during and after warm up phases but once it is flagged by Microsoft's filter you mine as well forget and expect the Microsoft contacts to receive any future mailings.  Good luck all!

[MPrentice]

In that case, since full DKIM + SPF alignment is not possible, we're going to stop using HubSpot for all emails and move all of those types of features to another platform that supports full alignment.

[DeliveryByJess]

Please take a look at this post which covers what to expect for SPF alignment and use of DMARC with HubSpot:

https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Email-Deliverability/DMARC-compliance-DKIM-SPF/m-p/419783

[Domo]

Hey we're running into this too.

[MPrentice]

We've been running into this too and SPF alignment is our latest issue after getting HubSpot's SPF added to our Gmail SPF. Unfortunately, during this process we've seen a big drop in our Google Page Rank that is directly related to the SPF failures we're seeing only with emails from via HubSpot marketing.

Where can we find more about this add-on for a custom mail-from domain? It doesn't show up anywhere in the Dmarc or SPF help docs.

[PamCotton]

Hello @bhb1991 

Just wanted to confirm if the domain you are sending from is exactly the same as what your Email Sending Domain is connected for? The reason is that DKIM won't pass and DMARC could fail as a result.

• Connect your email sending domain

Kindly,

Pam

[bhb1991]

Hi Pam

Yes it is.

The strangest thing about it is that Microsoft 365 doesn't always stop the emails. My company recently sent out a email to promote a webinar we are hosting. But when I sent a reminder email a few days ago to those who had signed up, I found that a few of them had been quarantined while others went straight to their inbox. These same people had gotten the first email with no issue.

[PamCotton]

Hello @bhb1991 

SPF alignment required the domain actually used for sending the emails (the mail-from) the match the domain the email appears to be sent from (the friendly-from, which for most customers is what they have connected as their email sending domain).

For HubSpot marketing emails, these will almost never actually match, as the mail-from domain will be hubspotemail.net. It's only possible to achieve this kind of alignment with a dedicated IP and an additional add-on for a custom mail-from domain.

That said, this is typically not necessary for deliverability, and as long as customers have DKIM connected and HubSpot added to their SPF record, they should still be seeing their emails getting delivered. 

For the contacts that are being quarantined, was this the first time emailing these customers?

Thank you!

Pam

[bhb1991]

Hi Pam,

No, it wasn't the first time emailing. We had gotten back into email marketing about 4 months ago.