How to Avoid Missing Email Attachments in eCommerce Automated Emails

eCommerce businesses heavily rely on seamless email communication, with automated emails playing a pivotal role in providing order confirmations, invoices, shipment updates, and more. The most common attachment in eCommerce-related emails is the invoice. However, the stringent security protocols implemented by Google can sometimes lead to missing attachments in these emails and customers being unable to complete the transaction.

In this article, we will share our experience with our client’s Invoice emails reaching customer inboxes without attachments due to Google security protocols and the solution we found to fix the issue. 

Problem

One of our clients from the Baltics encountered a blocker issue during invoice send-out when a user who wanted to pay with a bank transfer could not do so because they didn’t receive the invoice to their Gmail account.

Google flagged the attachment with an error:

(smtp; 552-5.7.0 This message was blocked because its content presents a potential 552-5.7.0 security issue. Please visit 552-5.7.0 https://support.google.com/mail/?p=BlockedMessage to review our 552 5.7.0 message content and attachment content guidelines. 3-20020a251903000000b00b7254ecd13dsi19552296ybz.590 - gsmt)

A similar issue appeared for another client’s invoices—the attachment was there, but Gmail showed that the attachment might be a virus.

Actions

1. First, we checked if we use SPF and DKIM to verify that their email domain is a real domain.
2. We then checked if the email content contained any phishing links or other suspicious links.
3. We tried removing the barcode from the code in Magento when the email is generated, which didn’t help.
4. Lastly, we checked if other email service providers are flagging our attachments as malware. Here’s a great site for such checks!

Solution

The developer tried to reduce the PDF file size by changing the font. When changed, it suddenly got sent without issue and reduced PDF size. Magento (Adobe Commerce) PDF generation uses FreeSerif.ttf, FreeSerifBold.ttf, and FreeSerifItalic.ttf fonts that were marked by Google virus check as a virus. All Magento 2 instances use these font files for PDF generation.

Once changed to a font supporting Baltic characters (we used Arima), emails were sent out without issues. We hope this solution works for you, too!

Need help with your email campaigns, tracking, or GDPR compliance? scandiweb’s Growth specialists and engineers are one message away! Contact us today, and let us know how we can assist! 

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