Spam Scanning Service
Reputation Matters
Whether a host will accept mail depends mostly on the reputation of the sender. Because repairing a reputation is a long and difficult process, HostGator takes a proactive approach to reduce the likelihood of spam-like content being sent. To this end, all outgoing mail from our shared and reseller servers goes through a spam filtering service as a way of protecting the reputation of our mail gateways, and by proxy, your domain as well.
Spam Filtering
HostGator utilizes a third-party spam filtering service to scan and block all outgoing mail with questionable content and to help ensure the deliverability of your mail sent from HostGator servers. The spam filtering service aggregates reports from numerous sources to determine the sender's reputation and identify spam more effectively. Among the factors determining whether a message is considered spam include:
- Your domain name
- The gateway IP
- The email’s subject
- The content in your email
- DNS records (such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC)
Please check these articles to learn more about these important DNS records for your emails.
The more potential concerns for a message, the more likely it is to be tagged as spam.
But I Still Receive Spam
As mail sent to our servers is delivered directly to the server instead of going through a centralized location, we rely upon spam filtering software installed on our servers to filter incoming mail. This software does not pull from the same breadth of information that the outgoing filter does. We cannot guarantee that other hosts will take as comprehensive an approach in filtering their outgoing mail, so we are more forgiving with incoming mail. In order to help educate the filters on the servers, we recommend you utilize webmail or your mail client’s report feature to identify spam that makes it to your inbox.