I have realized that mail DOES get sent, but it automatically gets put in the Spam folder.
Does anyone have tips on how we can have our server send emails that don't automatically get put in spam? Are there methods to this so that our server looks more legitimate?
Do you have SPF set in your DNS? If so, is the sending server one of the permitted senders? If either of these isn't true, look at setting it up - it's not universally supported, but some large providers use it as an indicator (including gmail and hotmail).
Also, check that the email is being sent with a from address which resolves back to the server you're sending from: so if your site is example.com, make sure the email isn't "from" example.net.
Both of those can be done outside of Squiz changes.
Within Squiz, check that the email is sending with both text and html parts (if you're sending html mails) and that the content of them is at least vaguely similar (one spammer technique is to send a "clean" plain text which doesn't contain the spam phrases and a "dirty" html version, working on the incorrect logic that email spam filters ignore html versions). Strip down the design to the minimum acceptable. Check that the text doesn't contain spammy phrases.
Do you have SPF set in your DNS? If so, is the sending server one of the permitted senders? If either of these isn't true, look at setting it up - it's not universally supported, but some large providers use it as an indicator (including gmail and hotmail).
Also, check that the email is being sent with a from address which resolves back to the server you're sending from: so if your site is example.com, make sure the email isn't "from" example.net.
Both of those can be done outside of Squiz changes.
Within Squiz, check that the email is sending with both text and html parts (if you're sending html mails) and that the content of them is at least vaguely similar (one spammer technique is to send a "clean" plain text which doesn't contain the spam phrases and a "dirty" html version, working on the incorrect logic that email spam filters ignore html versions). Strip down the design to the minimum acceptable. Check that the text doesn't contain spammy phrases.
Great advice. Nope, no SPF set in the DNS, but will do that.
Sounds like the major problem is, since we are still using the IP for the site as we build it, there is no emails attached to the domain. So we are just using a gmail account as the FROM.
So we are just using a gmail account as the FROM.
It's odd, I was just warned about doing this yesterday. It's commonly used by spammers/phishers and some spam tools will flag it just based on that (to and from fields the same and not matching the originating server). It will have higher chance of reaching the person if the email address in the from field has the same domain as the originating server.