topic Re: Why are my emails being treated as spam? in Email

Why are my emails being treated as spam?

penneck — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 17:55:33 GMT

This morning I was told by my local parkrun that my emails to them went straight to their spam folder. They found them by chance. This is a recent problem because, before amonth ago, my emails to parkrun had got to them without a problem. I told a friend who I had also sent emails recently, and he told me that he had found my emails in his spam folder too. As far as I know, these are the only cases but if my emails are going to spam folders how would other recipients know I had sent them?

Do I have a spam folder (where is it hiding - I don't know), so how do they know they have them, and why would they go to those spam folders to see if anything is waiting there?

Is this a Greenby problem or gmail problem, or what? I dont use gmail but the recipients might.

Any answers, please? Thanks in advance for any help

Re: Why are my emails being treated as spam?

PhilipHeyes — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 18:06:49 GMT

Which SMTP server name or webmail address are you using to send ?

Which email operators are sending the messages to junk mail ?

if you can get hold of the email header / source of a few of the junked messages
you can investigate the exact reasons for the junk / spam status.

E.g is there a FAIL for SPF / DKIM or DMARC or some other reason for downgrade to junk status.

Re: Why are my emails being treated as spam?

penneck — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 21:00:56 GMT

Hello @PhilipHeyes .

I will try to answer your questions as best I can, but I'm not sure what you are asking, especially the second one.

(1) The SMTP server according to my Mailwasher software is "relay.plus.net".

(2) The Parkrun email address on the email that got treated as spam was "bournemouth@parkrum.com". I don't want to publish the email address of my friend just here in case it is a security risk - the parkrun address is readily available

(3) I may have misunderstood the third question. Do you mean I should get my friend to reply to my email that got spammed so that I can investigate it, rather than look at what I sent before it reached him?

Sorry if I seem a bit thick, but this is an area where I am particularly ignorant

Re: Why are my emails being treated as spam?

PhilipHeyes — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 06:28:15 GMT

From the last comment we can see spam issues could well be due to SPF=FAIL because
Plusnet's relay.plus.com does not appear in the SPF list of approved senders for domain parkrun.com

https://www.nslookup.io/domains/parkrun.com/dns-records/

Re: Why are my emails being treated as spam?

PhilipHeyes — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 07:34:06 GMT

To send via the Plusnet hosted SMTP : relay.plus.net or via a Greenby hosted SMTP : mail.enmail.co

The parkrun.com domain would need entries like are seen here :

https://www.nslookup.io/domains/plusnet.plus.com/dns-records/

But would be easier / much preferable to replace SMTP relay.plus.net with an already defined SMTP server from Google.

E.g. if you collecting the emails from pop3 or imap.gmail.com then perhaps using the same credentials via smtp.gmail.com
are worth investigating.

Re: Why are my emails being treated as spam?

penneck — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 16:27:35 GMT

If I am using the Plusnet SMTP, and if that is causing this problem, why are other people receiving my emails without them being treated as spam?

Apparently, if I want to continue to use my plusnet email address (and I do), I have to use Greenby. I don't want to go to gmail. Otherwise I will have to tell who knows how many friends, relations, businesses I would have to tell of my change to gmail.

Re: Why are my emails being treated as spam?

PhilipHeyes — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 16:58:14 GMT

If like us the ISP / mail operator's SPAM filter is disabled, the messages may be delivered.

However from what I can see of the DNS record for bournemouth@parkrun.com Plusnet do not appear to be hosting the email inbox and if that is correct, sending via relay.plus.net is sending forged / spam emails regardless of the content.

When the migration to Greenby completes for relay.plus.net what you appear to be doing now will no longer be possible as the Greenby SMTP requires authentication and will only send for a valid email or alias of the <subdomain>.plus.com that matches your credentials.

Who is operating the POP3 or IMAP server for bournemouth@parkrun.com ? Their SMTP is the one to use.

Re: Why are my emails being treated as spam?

mavison — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 20:26:28 GMT

I thought the @penneck was sending emails to parkrun, who found them in their Spam box?

I saw no suspicion that plusnet was hosting parkrun, and why should the op use their SMTP server?

But I could be very confused!

Re: Why are my emails being treated as spam?

penneck — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 10:00:17 GMT

Hello @PhilipHeyes

If bournemouth@parkrun.com need to be hosting Plusnet to receive emails, does that mean they also need to be hosting just about every other email system in the world or those emails wont be accepted by parkrun either?

Re: Why are my emails being treated as spam?

pvmb — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 10:45:15 GMT

@penneck wrote:

This morning I was told by my local parkrun that my emails to them went straight to their spam folder. They found them by chance. This is a recent problem because, before amonth ago, my emails to parkrun had got to them without a problem. I told a friend who I had also sent emails recently, and he told me that he had found my emails in his spam folder too. As far as I know, these are the only cases but if my emails are going to spam folders how would other recipients know I had sent them?

Is this a Greenby problem or gmail problem, or what? I dont use gmail but the recipients might.

As you describe it here I would say it is partly a Gmail problem (assuming parkrun is hosted on Gmail *) and partly a Plusnet/BT host IP address range issue - much referred to in other posts on this forum.

Your friends would know about your messages in their spam folders if they checked their own spam folders!

Firstly, as your emails have at least been delivered, albeit to the recipient's spam folder, it is IMO up to the recipients to help by marking them as 'Not Spam' at their end. Hopefully they would then teach their end's spam filter that your emails are not spam, for future use. If this doesn't work - it should help - then more approaches may need to be tried.

The background to all this, IMO, is the increasing amount of spam email companies have to deal with now, due to the use of AI Bots in generating spam etc. Companies are having to use higher security checks to try and cope and this is causing problems of various kinds.

* Search Assistant says: "Parkrun emails are hosted by Parkrun Global Limited, which operates the parkrun events and manages their communications."

Re: Why are my emails being treated as spam?

penneck — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 18:23:22 GMT

Over the last few days I have been having the occasional problem when sending emails when I get an error message (for some reason I couldn't get it into a pdf file). It states:-

"Sending of the message failed

An error occurred while sending mail. The mail server responded: Error: Queue file write error. Please check the message and try again"

If I just close that message and click on "send" again, it goes, and according to the recipients, they have received it.

Is this just another symptom of the same problem?

Re: Why are my emails being treated as spam?

penneck — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 18:34:48 GMT

Hello @mavison

You were right. I was sending emails to parkrun, and they were finding them in their spam folder. I think someone in the forum was getting confused (it wasn't me guv!).

I was also sending emails to a friend and he was finding them in his spam folder. In both cases (Parkrun and friend) why are they going into spam folders? They never used to.

At the risk of confusing people again, I went looking for my spam folder, but I failed to find it. Do I have one? If so, where is it hiding?

Re: Why are my emails being treated as spam?

mavison — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 21:42:04 GMT

@penneck wrote:
You were right. I was sending emails to parkrun, and they were finding them in their spam folder. I think someone in the forum was getting confused (it wasn't me guv!).

I was also sending emails to a friend and he was finding them in his spam folder. In both cases (Parkrun and friend) why are they going into spam folders? They never used to.

At the risk of confusing people again, I went looking for my spam folder, but I failed to find it. Do I have one? If so, where is it hiding?

So you were sending emails which are treated as Spam by the receiving system? The Spam rating can be caused by the content - but that seems unlikely - but it can also be caused by the source (eg email address and server addresses). It could be that one of the servers has a bad reputation. Have you been migrated to Greenby?

Some of the thoughts you were receiving emails may have been provoked by your mention of Mailwasher knowing the SMTP server name. I know very little about MailWasher, but I thought it was for receiving emails, not for sending (which SMTP is used for). Why does Mailwasher know the sending server?

Re your Spam folder: what do you use to read your emails? It could be Plusnet Webmail, Greenby Webmail, or an email client program running on your device. Webmail uses the IMAP servers to read emails, and you should be able to see the Spam (or Junk?) folder there. An email client can use IMAP (and could see the Spam folder) but can use POP3 (which cannot see any folder except InBox. Details of what is being used may help.

Re: Why are my emails being treated as spam?

mavison — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 22:16:43 GMT

@penneck

The mail server responded: Error: Queue file write error.

I suffer from these daily, and have done ever since migration in December.

Please raise a ticket to an agent about it - they can be a real problem.

Re: Why are my emails being treated as spam?

penneck — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 11:21:01 GMT

Hello @mavison .

Re: The mail server responded: Error: Queue file write error.

I was moved to Greenby in about February this year.for my emails, and I got moved from Plusnet to EE on 23 April for my broadband. Which of them should I raise a ticket with? Just asking for clarification.

Re: Why are my emails being treated as spam?

mavison — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 12:48:35 GMT

@penneck wrote:

Hello @mavison .

Re: The mail server responded: Error: Queue file write error.

I was moved to Greenby in about February this year.for my emails, and I got moved from Plusnet to EE on 23 April for my broadband. Which of them should I raise a ticket with? Just asking for clarification.

The Write Error is from the SMTP email server, and your emails are now hosted by Greenby, so it is their problem.

Do not get fobbed off by the bot - it is a known problem and has been known for over 6 months, and it is getting worse!

Re: Why are my emails being treated as spam?

penneck — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 12:38:22 GMT

Hello @mavison . I've raised a ticket with Greenby, and I have received a reply that I change "relay.plus.net" to "mail.enmail.co". I have been into Mailwasher and done that wherever I have found "relay.plus.net", and I have gone into Thunderbird to do the same. I didn't find any in Thunderbird but I did find that SMTP was set to "mail.plusnet.enmail.co".

Why the difference?

Only time will tell if the changes and/or this difference solves the problems I have been having or cause other problems. Will try to let you know

My thanks to you and to @pvmb and @PhilipHeyes for your help

Re: Why are my emails being treated as spam?

mavison — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 14:19:47 GMT

@penneck

I believe the server addresses relay.plus.net still point to Plusnet servers, but the ones ending in enmail.co point to Greenby servers.

My server is relay.force9.net, which apparently does point to a Greenby server. My problems with Write Errors started the day when I was migrated in December, and relay.force9.net changed from pointing to a Plusnet Server to a Greenby one. And the problems have continued since then - indeed, in July I have recorded a 23% change of a send failing, the worst month so far.

It will be interesting to see what changes you see using Greenby servers.

Re: Why are my emails being treated as spam?

penneck — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 19:33:52 GMT

Hello @mavison . I was curious as to why today Greenby pointed me towards changing "relay.plus.net" to "mail.enmail.co", whereas I guess during the process of moving from Plusnet to Greenby back in February or March I was told to change "relay.plus.net" to "mail.plusnet.enmail.co".

Why the addition of plusnet in one version but not the other? Does this mean both should include "plusnet", or neither should include "plusnet"?

Re: Why are my emails being treated as spam?

mavison — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 20:14:52 GMT

@penneck

No idea, I am afraid. I have learnt though that what Greenby say may not sometimes be the whole truth.

I have not had to change any settings for the migration - but these things do seem to depend on what settings you had, and what 'brand' of Plusnet email you had.