Reporting false-positive spam email in MailChannels

Overview

The following instructions describe how to mark and report a false-positive spam message to DreamHost.

Background

There may be situations when an email you send is returned back to you and marked as spam or an incoming email is incorrectly marked as Spam.

• Outgoing emails — DreamHost scans all outbound emails for potential spam. It is not possible to disable this feature, but you are able to mark the returned email as a "false positive" so that it will be successfully sent from DreamHost's mail servers.
• Incoming emails — Please report falsely flagged emails to DreamHost support so they may be reported to the filtering service to help train the filter.

Reporting false positives (in MailChannels)

Use the following steps to open the MailChannels dashboard in order to mark it as a false positive:

1. Log into your email client.
2. Open the message that was bounced back to you as spam. A bounced message that DreamHost suspects is spam appears as follows:
   <example@example.com>: host smtp.mailchannels.net[52.43.13.119]
   said: 550 5.7.1 [CS] Message blocked. If this is a false positive,
   please report this to your hosting service provider. See https://console.mailchannels.net/insights/bounce
   (in reply to end of DATA command)
3. Click the link in the email to open the MailChannels dashboard. The above example shows the https://console.mailchannels.net/insights/bounce link, but the one you see may be different.

   An email status box opens in MailChannels.

4. Click the Not Spam button to mark the message as a false-positive email.
5. Click the Confirm button when the pop-up box appears, which confirms that the message wasn't spam and you're reporting it as a false positive. A success message appears.

Reporting falsely flagged emails (to DreamHost)

Follow these steps to report such issues to DreamHost.

1. Log into your email address.
2. Create a new folder named something like falsely-flagged.
3. Move all falsely flagged emails into this new folder.
4. Log into your DreamHost panel and create a ticket for support. Make sure to specify the folder name you created for these falsely flagged emails.

DreamHost support will then be able to report these emails to help train the mail filter in the future.

See also

• Anti-spam overview
• Why is my email going to spam?
• Configure Anti-Spam settings
• MailChannels SMTP Error Codes