A few users contacted me that they did not received the confirmation e-mail while registering on my forum. I asked them to check the Spam folder and Gmail classified my email as spam.
I am not doing spam, I am not stressing my members with newsletters, I am sending only 1-2 newsletter per year.
I did a check on mail-tester.com for the confirmation email and the good part is that I am getting a 10/10 score.
https://www.mail-tester.com/web-rry6t&reloaded=1
Why Gmail don't like my confirmation email? I am afraid I will never discover :)
Someone here mentioned a few weeks before the links inside the mails may be the problem. Try to edit the mail text and delete the links that are not really neccessary.
Use SMTP relay like sendgrid. all my emails are received normally.
Not unusual, it happens here as well.
In your case it may be relevant:
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/HruhcLvodkY
I use SMTP from sparkpost.
I'll check the link provided by emanuele, I'm on mobile right now
TL;DR: the IP in on a blacklist that seems to be used by google (if I got it right).
Probably a dedicated IP will solve this, I already seen blacklisted IP's from major providers like Amazon SES, SparkPost, ElasticMail etc
Don't know if is a good idea, but probably I'll abandon external SMTP and setup Postfix to send emails from my forum.
I would also suggest SMTP relay from google email itself. As discussed before it can send up to 2 or 3 thousands email per day. And setting it up is not that difficult too.
Banning Gmail is the worst solution an admin could take. Most of my users are registered with gmail accounts (1080 users from a total of 2800)
Sparkpost like other SMTP providers are using different ip's to send emails and could happen that some of these ip's are marked as spam. Seem working fine now, I already saw about a dozen of new users registered correctly with gmail/yahoo/hotmail and other email providers from Italy.
In this case it's not about you, but your users. I joined a forum a few months ago and recently the adimin announced that Hotmail addresses will be banned for similar reasons of emails not delivered correctly, so he asked all users to change email to different provider than Hotmail. Well I did not changed my Hotmail address, I use it since 2003, why should I change it? I am waiting for the ban :)
Ban on popular email service provider and ip address doesn't make sense to me too. Similar to banning popular email service provider, most ip are dynamic and banning them means to ban those who are using that dynamic ip too. Besides, spammers aren't so hard to combat. Some even manipulate the spammers to keep them coming and register with their sites.
Guys could you guide me on where I can check and change the email confirmation sent to my users? I think it needs some editing to make it go directly into their inbox and not spam folder.
If you are looking for the templates that the site uses for all emails, there are all in /themes/default/languages/english/EmailTemplate.english.php
The registration one, well one of them as it depends on how you have things set up, can be found under $txt['register_activate_body']
Although the number of links to text ratio may cause a spam flag, there are lots of other reasons why site email could get flagged which have nothing to do with ElkArte. Such as your servers IP reputation and its proper use of SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
My problem was temporary, one of the Sparkpost IP's finished into a blacklist, once solved no more problems with confirmation email.
I suggest you to use an external smtp from Sendgrid, Sparkpost, mailgun, etc...
I am using G Suite as my external SMTP for the time being as I am so used to Gmail BUT I will look into other options in the future since they keep changing their settings and policies making it harder to follow. They caused "breakdown" in the mailing system..
I am thinking to get a reasonable VPS that come with good IP address just for setting up a proper email server in extension of my current personal one. This could be a useful venture for the future.
GMail sees IP and domain reputation. I created my own mail server, it has SPF, DKIM, & DMARC, for the first semester emails came from my server landed on spam folder, until lately it show up on Inbox