Why has the email I sent ended up in spam?

When talking with companies looking to get IT support, it is not uncommon to find out that one of their primary motivations for getting help is that more and more of their emails are ending up in spam, making it very tricky for them to do business. There are quite a few reasons why a company's emails may increasingly land in a recipient's spam folder. In this blog post, I will go over a few of the more common reasons.

A poor sender reputation.

The most common cause is that the company has been sending large volumes of marketing emails from its primary domain name—the one it also uses for legitimate business.

Over time, these marketing emails will get marked as spam, and along with other factors, the domain's reputation will be harmed. It usually ends up on at least one or more spam blocklists. Once your domain is on a blocklist, removing it is very hard if you don't know why it is on a blocklist, what you have done wrong and what you need to do to rectify the problem.

In one case, the company we spoke to had done nothing wrong, but their hosting provider was also sharing the server they were using to send their marketing emails with someone else who was sending nefarious emails, and this damaged their sending reputation.

Kimbley IT has become skilled at getting new clients off blocklists, increasing their domain reputation and significantly decreasing the likelihood of future emails ending in spam.

A poorly configured mail server.

Next, we frequently find email systems not configured correctly, missing vital settings that prove the legitimacy of outgoing messages—affecting the delivery of emails while making it easier for a criminal to send emails pretending to be from their company.

In 2024, Google and Yahoo, two of the world's largest email providers, announced a toughening stance on emails, especially mass marketing emails from misconfigured email servers. With this change, companies that have failed to implement correct sender authentication settings will likely find their emails in spam. With Google leading the way, other companies, such as Microsoft, followed this new stance.

To meet the new requirements and reduce the chances of their emails landing in spam, companies needed to ensure they had the correct domain settings. These settings have been around for, in some cases, well over 30 years. Still, it is surprising how many companies we onboard have these settings missed.

You need to set up at least three settings on your domain name, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, for your primary email service and any email marketing services you may use to send emails. Marketing emails must also include an easy unsubscribe option.

Spammy language.

Spam filters analyse the text in the subject line and body of messages and the underlying code for specific keywords and patterns that spammers typically use. If an incoming message contains too many of these suspect phrases, it will almost certainly get canned automatically.

There are hundreds of 'dodgy' phrases to avoid, including 'buy direct', 'additional income', 'work from home', 'one hundred percent free', and 'lower interest rate'. You can find an extensive list of these keywords over at Active Campaign.

If you send emails that include these spammy phrases, the likelihood of your email going to spam does increase, but not by too much unless you decide to go all in and completely load up your email with these phrases!