What to Do if Emails Go to Spam
Preventing your sent email from going to the spam inbox of the recipient
If the emails you send land in the recipient's spam folders, there are a few reasons why this may happen:
- Specific DNS records are missing from your domain's DNS zone
- Your content is detected as spam-like
- You use an unsecured method to send emails
You can prevent your emails from being marked as spam by following the below recommendations.
- Mark Messages as “Not spam”
This solution will solve the issue at the receiver's end. You can ask the recipients themselves to mark the emails you’ve sent as Not spam. Once they do that, emails from you won’t end up in their spam inbox.
- Add DNS Verification
Two specific DNS records are used to verify email:
- SPF (stands for Sender Policy Framework) record allows domain owners to specify which email servers are authorized to send emails on their behalf
- DKIM (stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail) record is used for signing and verifying the authenticity of emails: it involves adding a digital signature to outgoing emails that the recipient's email server can verify
Both these records are of TXT type and should be added to your domain's DNS zone.
- Check Email Deliverability
Sometimes, instead of going to spam, the email is not even delivered to the recipient.
Change the Sending Method
Another common cause is using an unreliable, non-secure method for sending emails, such as the phpmail() function.
While phpmail() is enabled on our servers, we recommend you use it for one-time sending and testing purposes only.
For regular correspondence, you need to switch to SMTP. It's a much more reliable way to send emails, which will improve the delivery of your messages. An additional bonus when switching to SMTP is that emails sent via phpmail() show the sender as a generic address:
When sending emails via SMTP, the recipient will be able to see your domain name as the sender, which gives you more trust.
