Emails sent from a hosted Discourse instance are being mis-categorized as “Promotional” in Gmail. phi has configured SPF and DKIM but the issue persists. rikling suggests that the issue cannot be fixed with Discourse alone and requires Gmail to recategorize emails as “Forums”. codinghorror requests more details about the site and suggests testing with mail-tester.com. After testing, phi discovers issues with their SPF records due to exceeding the DNS-interactive terms limit. Removing a mx from the SPF record resolves the issue and achieves a perfect score with mail-tester.com. This solution may be helpful for others running into similar issues.
Hello, email sent from our (hosted) discourse instance seem to always appear in the “Promotion” tab of our user’s gmail account which ends up being confusing for most of them.
There have been a few topics about this issue but didn’t find any solution and decided to create a new topic instead of necro-posting.
I did follow the howto instructions to configure SPF and DKIM.
Anyone with a solution to this issue?
This isn’t fixable with Discourse. You’d have to ask them to recategorize it as Forums.
I have never seen it categorize as Promotion. Can you provide much more detail on your site, its URL, ip addresses,etc?
Also what happens when you send a test email through Discourse via Admin, Email, test to https://www.mail-tester.com – what does it tell you?
Update on this: testing with https://www.mail-tester.com did show some issues with our spf records.
We use Google Apps and UserVoice and already had an spf record that was formated like this:
v=spf1 a mx include:_spf.google.com include:smtp1.uservoice.com ~all
Adding support for discourse generated the following error when checking with mail-tester:
Maximum DNS-interactive terms limit (10) exceeded
Removing a mx got us a score of 10/10 for our email test. It seems that it was something that was suggested by UserVoice documentation but not mentioned by Discourse or Google’s doc.
Maybe a DNS expert can give more information to make this useful for ppl running into a similar issue.