Over the past 36 hours, about 15 routine emails I’ve sent out (including to some people I’ve exchanged email with previously at these identical email addresses) have been rejected and returned as spam.
I get this response to each failure from Gmail: “Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently: [email] Technical details of permanent failure: Message rejected. See http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?answer=69585 for more information.”
So I go to that link, and I get this:
Here at Gmail, we work very hard to fight spam. This includes not only spam coming into Gmail but spam being sent out from Gmail as well. Believe it or not, spammers sign up for Gmail addresses in large numbers just to send out spam! To help do our part to keep this junk off of the internet, we bounce mail that we are confident is spam. Unfortunately, we aren’t perfect and will occasionally bounce legitimate mail. We apologize for the inconvenience.
There are a number of ways you can inadvertently confuse our automated spam filter, by sending suspicious-looking or spammy text, for example. By far the most common problem is sending mail cc/bcc’d to large numbers of recipients (“bulk mail”) to send out newsletters, invitations, etc. Since spam is sent to many recipients, our spam filter is slightly more likely to confuse bulk mail with spam.
All of my rejected email were individual emails to only one recipient at a time. I’ve never had this problem before. I’ve never used lukeisback@gmail.com to spam.
After logging a dozen complaints with Gmail with no response, I’ve returned to using my AOL email account.
