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Emails going to spam and how to find out

When it breaks 6 min read

Why your quotes and replies land in customers' junk folders without anyone telling you, how to test it yourself today, and what to ask to get it fixed.

A customer calls to ask where the quote is. You sent it on Tuesday. You can see it in your sent folder, with the attachment, addressed correctly, and they never got it. They find it later in junk, or they never find it.

This is the normal way it fails, not a rare accident, and it goes on for months because nothing on your side looks wrong.

You are the last person to hear about it

Junk is a silent decision made by the recipient's mail provider, not by them and not by you. Nothing bounces. Your sent folder shows a clean record of messages that were delivered and never read.

So the signs are indirect: quotes going unanswered at a rate that feels new, people saying they never heard back when you know you replied, somebody mentioning they found you in spam, which usually means several others did too and said nothing.

If two of those have happened this quarter, assume it is happening and go and look.

Two different failures that feel the same

Before you spend an evening on this, work out which direction is broken. They have nothing to do with each other.

Mail going out from you and landing in customers' junk is one problem. Inquiries from your website form not reaching you at all is a different one, usually a wrong address or a form that stopped sending years ago. The symptoms feel identical from your chair.

Test the form separately by filling it in yourself. This page is about the messages you send.

Test it in ten minutes

Set up free mailboxes at two or three big providers, one at Gmail, one at Outlook, one at Yahoo, and keep them. They cost nothing and they are the only honest mirror you have.

Send yourself a real message from your normal address, the kind you would send a customer, with the attachment you usually send. Then check the inbox and the junk folder of each one. Where it landed is your answer.

There are also free mail testers on the web. You send a message to the address one gives you, and it reports back on whether your name is properly signed. You do not have to understand the report. You have to be able to hand it to somebody who does.

The three records that vouch for you

Mail providers no longer take a sender's word for who they are. They check the domain the message claims to come from, and that check relies on three small pieces of text stored with your domain name.

The first is a list of who is allowed to send mail in your name. The second is a signature added to each message so it can be checked as genuine. The third is an instruction telling providers what to do when the first two fail, and where to send reports about it.

You do not need to configure these yourself. You need to know they exist, that a mail tester will tell you which are missing, and that missing ones are the commonest reason ordinary business mail lands in junk.

They also break through no fault of yours. Move your website to a new host and the old list can be left pointing at a sender you no longer use. Start using a new invoicing app or booking system that sends on your behalf, and it will not be on the list unless somebody adds it. Both are silent.

Sending in your own name from an account that is not yours

There is one setup that fails more than any other, and it is common because it used to work.

Somebody buys a domain, points mail sent to it into a personal free mailbox, and sets that mailbox to put the business name in the from line. It looks right in every test the owner can perform, because you can always read your own mail.

What the receiving side sees is a message claiming to come from your business, sent by something with no permission to speak for it. Providers used to shrug at that. Increasingly they do not, and messages sent that way are often filed as junk without telling either of you. If your setup was described to you as a clever way to avoid paying for a mailbox, this is worth checking first.

What the message itself does

Sending the same text to thirty customers with all of them in the To line looks like a mass mailing and reads as one. A message that is one big image with no text does too. Attachments people cannot preview, especially compressed folders, are treated harshly, so a link to the file is often safer than the file. Shortened links look like something being hidden. A subject line in capitals trips the oldest filters there are.

The plainest version of your message is the one most likely to arrive. That is a slightly depressing rule, and it holds.

What to ask the person who looks after your mail

You do not have to fix this yourself, and you should not have to learn what the records are called. You do need to ask precisely, or you will get told it is fine.

Ask these, in writing. Are the three sending records set up for our domain, and can you send me the test report showing it. Is every service that sends mail as us on that list, including the website, the invoicing app and the booking system. Did anything change when we last moved hosts. And what will you do to check this again in six months.

If the answer is that mail is not their department, that is fair, and you now know who is missing from this. If the answer is that everything looks fine and no report follows, ask again with the report you generated yourself attached.

Nobody can promise every message will reach an inbox. Providers decide that, and they do not publish the rules. What can be done is to set your name up properly, so their decision is not made against you before the message is read.

A short checklist

Questions people ask

Why do my emails go to spam when I have done nothing wrong

Almost always because the records that vouch for your domain are missing or out of date, not because of anything you wrote.

Can I tell whether my email went to junk

Not from your sent folder. The only reliable way is to send to mailboxes you control at the big providers and look in their junk folders.

Does it help if the customer marks my message as not spam

For that customer, yes, and it helps a little in general. It is not a fix for a domain that is not set up properly.

Would paying for business email solve it

It makes it much easier to set up properly, which is most of the battle. Paying for a mailbox with the records left unconfigured still fails.

We moved hosts and this started. Is that a coincidence

Probably not. Sending records commonly get left behind in a move, and the symptoms appear weeks later, which hides the connection.

How often should this be checked

Twice a year, and any time you add a new service that emails customers on your behalf. Those additions are what usually breaks a working setup.

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