Whether you’re using Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo Mail or something different, we all want legitimate emails to reach our inbox, and everything else to be filtered through as spam or junk. The concept applies to any emails you send too – you want them to reach the recipient as intended, and you don’t want your own emails to land in their spam or junk.
If you’ve landed here, you’re likely wondering how to stop emails going to spam, whether that’s for your personal email address, your work email address, or for your team. In order to get to the bottom of the issue, we’ll help you understand why it might be happening in the first place.
Why Do Some Emails Automatically Go to Spam?
For the most part, emails that are relevant and sent from another person should be received directly through your inbox. That logic applies to any emails you send to other people as well.
However, there are some cases where emails that you want, need or have sent are marked as spam or junk, and might never make the complete journey to the recipient’s inbox.
There are a bunch of reasons we’ve seen as to why, and it’s not always easy to pick out. Some include:
- Poor sender reputation, which can be caused by recipients marking your content as spam (whether accidentally or not), or even sending emails consistently to invalid addresses can lead to legitimate emails hitting spam folders.
- Spammy content like emails with a high volume of links, high-pressure sales language, and overuse of capital letters or symbols (just to name a few) can cause your emails to land in someone’s spam folder.
- Technical authentication issues, like missing email protocols, can cause delivery issues, as some platforms like Gmail and Outlook use those protocols to verify that an email is actually coming from you, or from the sender.
- Some things that might seem random or surprising at first, like unstable internet connection, compromised accounts (caused by cybersecurity threats as an example), and even breakdowns in your cloud solutions, can also cause emails to go directly to spam (or even not be delivered at all).
How to Ensure Emails Are Filtering Correctly
A good place to start is to use Google Postmaster tools (or similar) to check your domain reputation. Checking your domain reputation can be pretty simple, but you’ll need your domain and you’ll need to be able to verify ownership of that domain to get started. If everything looks good on that front, there are a few other things you can try.
#1 Try Short-Term, In-Platform Solutions
There are some short-term workarounds you can try as a first port of call across each of the most widely used service providers:
- If you use Gmail, you can add email addresses to your contacts, whitelist individual emails by marking them as ‘not spam’, or even create custom filters.
- If you’re on Outlook, you can also add email addresses to your contacts, or to a safe senders list.
- Yahoo Mail is similar; you can add email addresses to your contacts, or create a custom filter.
#2 Check Your Sending Patterns and Lists
This one involves making sure you’re validating recipient email addresses, especially if everything’s looking squeaky clean on your side.
You can use verification services to do this, but you can also ensure there’s a double opt-in (if relevant), check your mail exchange (or MX) records and analyse syntax (e.g. ensuring email addresses are adhering to standards, and even reviewing email content as well).
#3 Authenticate Your Domain
This is one of those times where you can judge a book by its cover, because this is where we talk about authenticating your domain. This is sometimes where the problem lies when there are issues with sending and receiving emails, so it’s always good to triple-check.
Authenticating your domain typically involves verifying ownership of it, and adding DNS records to your host. It not only reduces spam risks, but marks your emails as legitimate and makes sure they arrive at their destination as intended.
How Managed IT Can Help Stop Your Emails Going to Spam
If you’re trying to figure out how to stop emails going to spam (whether it’s private work messages or for email marketing), the above tips are good places to start. If you need some specialist support or advice, you can lean on a managed IT partner like Xenex Systems.
When it comes to the nitty gritty, we can help prevent domain spoofing and put exceptional security measures in place, but in the same breath, you’ll have access to an expert team that can identify and troubleshoot exactly what might be causing these issues.
So, if you’re looking to tighten up your email security, come up with a long-term strategy that sets you up for success, or you just need a hand with your IT more generally, get in touch with us today. We’ll start with a chat and a free audit of your systems.