What is the problem?

You have placed a link in plain text (“https://www.example.com”) in your message and the anti-spam analysis signals a potential phishing issue that could impact the deliverability of your messages.

What is phishing?

For some years now, some “smart” individuals have been sending emails pretending to be banks or other entities. To do this, they exploit the fact that, thanks to HTML, it is possible to display a site’s address on a link and make it go to another site when clicked.

A concrete example: the link below displays “www.example.com” but actually points to “www.google.fr” (hover over it or click on it to verify - the link will open in another page):

https://www.example.com

It is also easy for a hacker to exploit this functionality. In the email they send, they place a link in this form: www.yourbank.com which actually points to a fake site… This site is an exact copy of the original site, so if you do not pay attention to the address displayed in the browser, you risk identifying yourself with your credentials. These credentials will be immediately captured and exploited by the hacker who set up this site.

What is the connection with link tracking?

All tracking systems use this principle to record clicks in your messages. When you apply tracking, your URLs (the link’s destination address) are modified as follows:

https://www.yourdomain.com becomes: https://trackingserver.com/click.php?recipient=id&url=https://www.yourdomain.com

(we have intentionally simplified the destination address)

This does not change the displayed text or the appearance of your message at all, we only modify the address behind the link. This way, we can record that the recipient identified by “id” clicked on your link. Once the click is recorded, the recipient successfully reaches your site. This operation is completely transparent to the person (it happens in a few milliseconds), but for anti-spam systems, it may appear that you are trying to make the tracking server look like “yourdomain.com”.

Some systems then detect a phishing risk.

How to fix the issue?

Two solutions are possible. The first is to never place a link in plain text with your site’s address when applying tracking.

For example, replace: www.mysite.com (or https://www.mysite.com) with: “Visit the Mysite site” that points to “https://www.mysite.com”.

To do this in OxiMailing, it’s simple: in the editor, enter the text “Visit our site” (for example) then select it. Next, right-click and select “Add a link…”. In the window that appears, enter the website’s internet address in the “URL” field (https://www.mysite.com in the example).

Second solution: you can use the “tracking link customization” technique to avoid this issue. For more information: What is link tracking customization on your domain?