domain reputation unexpectedly tanked (using Flodesk)

Hi all,

I am a sysadmin by day, used to work quite a bit with email lists and groups, troubleshooting (non-marketing) email delivery, setting up smtp relays - and now, by chance, am looking into an issue a local newspaper is having with their newsletters marked as "phishing" by gmail.

I am trying to figure why:

1. local newspaper's email newsletters are ending up in gmail spam folder and marked as "dangerous" (as in, marked as phishing) starting on April 25, and now that we added the domain to Google Postmaster Tools (GPMT), 2. the domain reputation started tanking on April 12 and went all the way down to "bad, bad, bad" around May 16.

Nothing changed on the newspaper's side except their site's hosting moved to a new host (Hostinger) in early March. The newsletter service remained the same (for over a year now) with no changes of any kind.

The number of newsletter subscribers increased less than 2% in a given month, all other litmus tests in GPMT (authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), user reported spam rate, encryption, delivery errors) - all spotless, no issues. I've tried feeding the headers and the bodies of newsletters to ChatGPT to see if it could spot anomalies, changes or issues - nothing.

I emailed Flodesk Support about the issue and their response was... strange to my eyes:

>Our team is aware of this and is currently investigating it. In the meantime, we'd like to recommend a few things to help:

>\- Using "https://" at the beginning of all links within an email. This tells Gmail and other email clients that the link is a "secure" link.

>\- Sign up for[ Google Postmaster Tools](https://support.google.com/a/answer/9981691?hl=en). This tool helps monitor and improve the deliverability of emails sent to Gmail users.

>We appreciate your understanding and cooperation as we monitor and look into it.

Why would they suggest using any tools like GPMT if the issue is on their side. What would using that tool solve?

Why would they suggest using https links if we already do and they (of all people) know it too well?

I would very much appreciate any ideas and clues what to do next, and tests to run if any, and how to zero in on the culprit of the domain reputation tanking in GPMT if everything else there is spotless.

Thank you!

P.S. (Edit Sept 21, 2025): issue resolved ✅ - at least for now:

* after playing with redirects in newsletters for a while and a whole lot of experimenting and testing, I suggested to the publisher: 1. **remove the social links bar**; I don't know why - but removing it improved deliverability straightaway; I figured people don't read newsletters to get to social media - they want to scan it to see if anything in the newsletter spurs their interest - so there should be little harm in taking the bar down. 2. **remove one of the duplicate "unsub / manage subscriber prefs" blocks.** (There were two redundant ones in each newsletter for unknown reason, going back at least a year.) 3. **enable email verification** so people can't be subscribed w/o their consent. (This hasn't been an issue as the subscriber base is relatively small and engaged - and no known incidents of someone getting subscribed w/o consent - yet this is a prudent security and privacy measure as it prevents unwanted unsubscribes. * After the publisher implemented these changes at the end of July: * the newsletters stopped going to junk folders or getting marked as "dangerous", * the domain reputation started recovering and fully recovered a month later, by August 23.