Emails from Mailchimp getting quarantined by Microsoft for UN accounts

[hannahker]

We've been noticing that recent signals emails are getting flagged as "Phish" and quarantined by MS Outlook when sent to .un.org email addresses. There seems to be something in the Mailchimp content that Microsoft's algorithms are flagging.

Saeid suggested that it might be the "click tracking" enabled in Mailchimp, however we've removed this and emails are still getting quarantined.

Saeid has also mentioned that there could be some parallel work with Microsoft to resolve this as other false positives are occurring with UN emails.

[caldwellst]

We originally were sending all mails through AWS, but switched because the Centre's teams were not able to support us to build a profile management system. If there is no solution in Mailchimp, the easiest solution in my mind would be to simply send mails through AWS but use Mailchimp for subscription management.

• We already manually curate lists of emails to send through in our code base, so switching the endpoint to send through AWS would not be particularly difficult.
• It would take some work to recreate the modularity of the emails. We would need to create all unique combinations of locations that users should receive in their inbox, and then create emails for each of those and send out to the correct audience. Would require amendment of how we curate location blocks within an email.
• The HTML template would need minor adjustments to stop using Mailchimp code for text injection, but this is relatively minimal at the moment. I think we would essentially: create the archival campaign (the one with all locations for the alert) in Mailchimp still, because that gives us the archive link and storage. Then the actual mailing campaigns will just simply use the HTML passed to AWS. Should look identical since we have the full HTML template.
• Open and click tracking not possible with new setup, would need to create custom way to track, likely too complex for any near term implementation for user based tracking, but could use something like bitly to at least get general figures. Open rate similarly difficult.
• Would need testing to ensure the issues don't continue even in this new system. Mailchimp was not getting flagged when sending to CERF, only since we've expanded, and would like some confidence that these flags will stop. For instance, on Monday, I sent a personal email to Sophie from IPC and her response to me was quarantined based on a link I had sent her! Release from quarantine was then denied! Need more confidence in claims that AWS switching will prevent quarantine.

[caldwellst]

Closing this as UN IT seems to have resolved the issue by whitelisting links to the methodology page. It was the methodology link to GitBook that was flagged as phishing. https://un-ocha-centre-for-humanitarian.gitbook.io/hdx-signals

Will re-open if we begin to get quarantined again.