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Can using the mass email feature (limited to 250 emails per send) cause emails to goto spam?

In our org we generally use email both internally as well as to communicate with our active consumer customers (B2C). Recently some team members want to use the mass email feature to reach out to potential customers - i.e., email marketing. We know there's a limit of 250-500 emails per user and that's ok. We don't use email relay (volume is pretty low).

So, here's the question, what if people mark a bunch of those emails as spam - will that cause our other non-marketing emails to goto spam eventually, as well.

I understand that when salesforce delivers email they modify the "domain", e.g., emails come from xxxx-yyyy.nax.bnc.salesforce.com, and I imagine that helps ensure email deliverability across all their orgs, but can emails get traced back to us if a receiver marks the email as spam?

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Yes, having your mass emails marked as spam can cause your single emails bounced to spam or even bounced entirely. Even worse, egregious spamming action can cause Salesforce mail servers to trip automated spam blockers or manual blacklists. This can affect additional customers besides just you; not only are your users affected by spamming, you can also affect other clients that happen to route their email through the same servers.

Since this could be devastating (and has happened in the past), there are tracking headers sent with every email; anyone can simply open the headers and determine who sent the message and which organization it came from. Reports of email abuse and/or spam will be investigated, and can cause suspension or termination of your organization's email privileges. For additional information, see Salesforce.com Email Abuse Policy for information included in the headers. Salesforce maintains relationships with major blacklist providers to make sure that spam incidents don't restrict innocent users' emails.

I strongly recommend that you limit mass email privileges to users that are trained in commercial emailing laws and practices to avoid running into this problem. The last thing you want to do is to have to integrate a third-party email service because a user decided to send out tons of spam.

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  • Thanks, 2 questions: as a user can we tell if any of our emails are being marked as spam so we can adjust content etc. (as is done in MailChimp and other providers)? or at least get metrics around such things. Second, your post is really helpful, and after reading it as well as some of the links, it seems that because our emails are being combined with other org's emails, it would be difficult for an email company (e.g., Gmail) to figure out we're the offending company unless Gmail was examining the X-SFDC-LK tag in the email header (which I'm guessing is highly unlikely)
    – StartingAgain
    Oct 9, 2015 at 1:55
  • Most spam filters don't report blocked messages back to the sender, but if it did, bounce management can detect it (see Setup for details), and secondly, salesforce also sends a On-Behalf-Of header, so it's not too hard to figure out who the offending company is. Trial orgs have limited email capacity to avoid people signing up and sending tons of spam before they are caught. That's also why even paid orgs have such limited capacity, because salesforce has a stance that they aren't meant to be a bulk mail provider.
    – sfdcfox
    Oct 9, 2015 at 2:12

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