Why Your Email Goes to Spam

How you find out

Usually by accident, and usually late.

Somebody mentions they never received a quote. You check and it was sent. They find it in junk, nine days old.

For every person who mentions it, several did not, and simply concluded you never replied.

Which makes this one of the more expensive invisible problems a small business can have, because the cost is enquiries you answered properly and lost anyway.

The three records

Most delivery problems are solved by these, and most small businesses have none of them set up correctly.

SPF lists which servers are allowed to send mail claiming to be from your domain. Without it, anybody can, and receiving systems know that.

DKIM adds a signature proving a message genuinely came from you and has not been altered.

DMARC tells receiving systems what to do when the first two fail, and can report back on what is being sent in your name.

They are records attached to your domain, they take a competent person under an hour, and they are the single highest-value fix in this subject.

Why it matters more than it used to

Filtering has become considerably stricter, and reasonably so.

A message from a domain with no authentication is now treated with suspicion by default, because that is what forged mail looks like.

Which means a small business that has never thought about this is not neutral in the eyes of a filter. It is slightly suspect, and one other factor tips it into junk.

That is a change from a few years ago, when unauthenticated mail was ordinary rather than a signal.

A worked example

A surveyor whose reports and quotes went by email as PDF attachments.

Two clients in a month mentioned not receiving something. He assumed coincidence.

Checking properly, his domain had no SPF record at all, and his mail was being sent from a server unrelated to anything his domain declared.

Roughly a third of his outgoing mail to certain providers was being filtered.

Adding the three records took an afternoon of somebody else's time. Delivery went to near enough everything he sent.

What he could not recover was a year of quotes that had gone to junk, or any sense of how much work that had cost.

The other common causes

• Sending from a shared server whose reputation depends on other customers.
• A mismatch between the sending server and the from address.
• Sending bulk mail from an ordinary mailbox rather than a proper service.
• Attachments of types filters treat cautiously.
• Link shorteners, which obscure destinations and are heavily used by spam.
• A history of complaints, where recipients marked previous mail as junk.

The third is the one that catches businesses sending a newsletter to two hundred people from their own mailbox, which looks exactly like the behaviour filters exist to stop.

Content, which matters less than people think

The advice about avoiding certain words is largely outdated.

Modern filtering weighs reputation and authentication far more heavily than vocabulary. Writing free or urgent does not send a legitimate message to junk on its own.

What does still matter: messages that are entirely one image with no text, excessive punctuation and capitals, and a mismatch between what a link says and where it goes.

Those are patterns rather than words, and avoiding them is ordinary good practice anyway.

If your mail is being filtered consistently, the cause is almost certainly configuration rather than anything you wrote.

The counter-case

Where this is not your problem to solve.

A single recipient whose own filter is unusually aggressive, or whose employer blocks external attachments. That is their configuration and the answer is a phone call rather than a technical project.

Mail to a large organisation with strict rules, where the fix is being added to an approved sender list by the person you are writing to.

And genuinely occasional filtering, which happens to everybody and is not a pattern.

The signal that it is your problem rather than theirs is several recipients across different providers, which points at your domain rather than at any one of them.

Checking your own position

1. Send a test to addresses at three different providers.
2. Check junk folders, not only inboxes.
3. Look at the message headers to see whether authentication passed.
4. Ask two customers whether your mail arrives normally.
5. Check whether your domain has the three records.

The third sounds technical and is simply a menu option in most mail clients. The headers state plainly whether each check passed or failed, which turns a guess into a fact you can act on.

What DMARC reporting tells you

An underused benefit of the third record, and the reason to set it up even if the first two are working.

DMARC can be configured to send you reports on every message sent claiming to be from your domain, including ones you did not send.

Which means you find out if somebody is forging your address, which happens more often to small businesses than people realise and damages your reputation without your knowledge.

It also shows you every legitimate service sending on your behalf, which frequently includes things nobody remembered: an invoicing system, a booking tool, a form on the website.

Each of those needs authorising in your records, and the reports are how you find the ones you forgot.

The reports themselves are dense, and several free services will summarise them into something readable.

Bulk mail is a separate thing

Worth separating, because the rules differ.

Sending a newsletter to a list is not the same as sending a quote to a customer, and it should not go through the same route.

A proper email service handles authentication, reputation, unsubscribes and bounce processing, all of which affect whether the mail arrives.

Sending bulk mail from a business mailbox damages the reputation of that mailbox, which then affects your ordinary correspondence.

Which means the newsletter can put your quotes in junk, and businesses almost never connect the two events.

Keeping the two separate, on different sending routes, protects the correspondence that actually earns you money.

How the same records affect your website's forms is covered in where the enquiry actually goes.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.