Effect on personal email of using lds.org email broadcasts

I have sent a handful of mass email messages to our stake members through the Send a Message feature in Clerk Resources. Since doing this, I have noticed that a lot of my personal emails seem to end up in the recipient's junk mail. I am wondering if using the broadcast feature somehow gets me reported as a spammer. Any thoughts?

Edit: The email associated with my lds.org account is gmail.

mlh78 wrote:Any thoughts?

Do I understand your question? You have sent out emails using the "send a message feature" on LDS.org and now, other personal and unrelated emails you send directly to others, unrelated to the church or lds.org, and sent from the gmail system or your email client, seem to be going to the recipients spam folder, and you think you may have had your email "marked" as a spammer?

kisaac wrote:Do I understand your question? You have sent out emails using the "send a message feature" on LDS.org and now, other personal and unrelated emails you send directly to others, unrelated to the church or lds.org, and sent from the gmail system or your email client, seem to be going to the recipients spam folder, and you think you may have had your email "marked" as a spammer?

Yes. When I broadcast an email stake wide through Send a Message, they are received as if they came from my gmail account. Now, when I send messages from my gmail account, be it to church members, friends, etc, I notice a marked increase in the number of my emails that are going to spam folders. I thought that google might have flagged me since it may see me as having sent thousands of messages at a time.

mlh78 wrote:I thought that google might have flagged me since it may see me as having sent thousands of messages at a time.

AFAIK, it's the recipient's provider that classifies spam. So unless they are also using Google, I doubt if it's Google doing it.

mlh78 wrote: I am wondering if using the broadcast feature somehow gets me reported as a spammer.

That is exactly what happens. But it usually happens at the receiving end by the ISP or mail service the recipient uses. This is one of the reapons I rarely use the broadcast feature. I build my own mail lists and do not sent many messages at a time.

At one point, sending ISPs blocked bulk mailings, but I think the Church changed something so that is less common now.

Recipient mail services use different algorithms to determine if a message is spam, but one of the most common is mere quantity (a lot of the same thing). Large bulk mailings will get you on that one in many cases.

On the other hand, I have perfectly legitimate e-mails that arrive in my spam box that are one of a kind and that I wish to have received. It is an inexact science.

lajackson wrote:Recipient mail services use different algorithms to determine if a message is spam, but one of the most common is mere quantity (a lot of the same thing). Large bulk mailings will get you on that one in many cases.

Another criterion used by email systems to determine spammers is when the sender's email address doesn't match the "From" address. That would be the case with the "Send a Message" feature, where the "From" email address is yours, but the actual sender is one of the Church's email servers.

In my job we've had that exact issue where we make it look like a message is from a person who initiated an email, but we send it from our mail server. That is sometimes categorized as spam.

We discussed this a bit at here

Google explains at this link: "Spoofing means faking the return address on outgoing mail to hide the true origin of the message."

While LDS.org is not trying to do this, it may appear similar enough to meet the "spoofing" definition and may cause your own spam filter to flag a message as not coming from who it says it is from. In other words, LDS.org sends the message for you, but says it is from you. But your question takes it one further, does this action then "mark" you as a spammer for other unrelated mail you send yourself to others? I don't think we'll ever know....