Messages from a bulk sender bounce

This page is for administrators. To manage groups for your own account, visit Google Groups help.

You might get this message when emailing a group:

"Message rejected by Google Groups. Please visit http://support.google.com/mail/answer/188131 to review our Bulk Email Senders Guidelines."

Typically, this means that other users have identified the IP address the message came from as sending spam-related messages. This will cause messages they send to bounce. Here are some ways to fix the problem.

Add the sender’s IP address to your allowlist

If a group message you sent has bounced:

1. Add the trusted sender’s IP addresses to the email allowlist.
   Bulk mail from this sender will no longer be reported as spam.
2. To identify which mail servers are permitted to send email on behalf of your domain, add an SPF record for your domain.
3. Customize your organization's spam filters to create an approved sender list to bypass any spam filters.

Turn on Google Groups for Business

Compared to other types of groups, Google Groups for Business provides more control over spam. For more control over filtering, turn on Google Groups for Business.

Relax a group’s spam controls

To relax a group's spam controls to allow delivery of suspected spam:

1. Sign in to Google Groups.
2. Click the name of a group.
3. On the left, click Group settingsPosting policies.
4. Under Spam message handling, select Post suspicious messages to the group.
5. Click Save changes.

Note: To limit the worst spam, messages marked as high-confidence spam are always rejected even if you relax the group’s spam controls.

Groups and trial accounts

When using Google Groups through a Google Workspace free trial account, you might experience the following limits:

• Your sending limits might be lower than the limits in Sending limits, below.
• You can only send group email to recipients inside your organization.
• You can't turn on autoreplies to people outside your organization, even if they're members of a group.
• You can't allow messages flagged by Google’s spam filters to be posted directly to a group.

Check your MX records

If you’re relaying mail through a non-Google mail server before sending to Google, you can use the Inbound Gateway field for your domain’s MX records. This field influences the behavior of reputation checks and SPF checks.

If your domain's MX records point to any other servers besides the Google-hosted servers:

1. In the Inbound Gateway field, enter the sending IP ranges from the servers that your MX records are pointing to.
2. Check that your MX records are correct.

Refer to Set up an inbound mail gateway.

Related topics

• Prevent mail to Gmail users from being blocked or sent to spam
• Spam and abuse policy
• Understand Groups policies and limits

Still need help?

Contact Google Workspace support.