email delivery report says “smtp;550 5.6.0. Sorry, looks like SPAM to me”

Networking
1

I hope this is the right forum for this.

I’m applying for a tech support job and I got a test that I have a week to complete, so I assume they expect me to do some research for it, so I was wondering if anyone here might be willing to lend a hand.

I’m supposed to give my response to a support ticket. The scenario is that a client is not receiving email alerts we send out and the mail delivery report says “smpt;550 5.6.0. Sorry, looks like SPAM to me”

Now, I’ve done a bit of googling and asking around, but my understanding of all this is still very shaky.

My response to this would be that we should tell the client to tell their IT dept to whitelist our domain or our IP, because it appears their mail server has blacklisted us.

Now, my questions are:

  1. Does that sound right to you? Is that what should be done here?

  2. From what I gather, there are other possible concerns here:

a) blacklisting on a broader level

Maybe our domain or our IP has been added to some blacklist and now mail servers across the internet will be rejecting our email.

b) SPF issues

Elsewhere, I’ve been advised that this may be due to SPF issues. I barely understand what SPF is, but with some googling, I’ve gotten a vague image.

Are those two legitimate concerns in the sense that besides telling the client to whitelist us we would need to look into whether there’s a problem with either of these two because others may be not getting our mail.

Is there anything else besides these two possibilities I should check?

2

The root of the problem is that your domain is being put on a blacklist. Sure whitelisting will fix the issue in this specific instance but then you’re potentially having to ask every company to whitelist even though it’s your company’s fault. If you yourself aren’t in charge of email and/or DNS, then whoever is needs to make sure that DKIM is setup properly on the mail server and that you have proper DMARC and SPF records published.

Granted I’m not familiar with this stuff myself because I’ve just never dealt with email servers before but I did learn some info about it because of reddit thread on r/sysadmin about a month ago.