Why your emails land in spam and what a small sender can do about it

You sent the quotation on Monday, and on Thursday the buyer says it never came. Mail like that often sits in a spam folder. It lands there when the receiving mailbox cannot be sure the message is really from you, or when enough recipients have ignored or reported your mail before. A small sender can fix the first with a proper sending address on their own domain and the second with a cleaner list. Wording is the last thing to check, not the first, because a rewritten subject line cannot help if the mailbox cannot confirm who sent the message. Work through them in that order.

First, find out how bad it is

Do not guess from one customer who said "I never got it". Send one ordinary message to four addresses you control or can ask: a Gmail, an Outlook or Hotmail, a Yahoo and a company address. Ask each person to tell you which folder it reached, and whether it was in the main inbox or in promotions.

If it reaches the main inbox on all four, the problem is with that one customer's mailbox, and you can ask them to move your address to their contacts. If it fails on all four, read on. If it fails on one provider only, the cause usually sits with that provider's view of your address, which is the same ladder, just more visibly.

Step one: who is the message from?

This is the technical bit, and it is shorter than it sounds. A mailbox wants proof that your domain, say yourfirm.in, allows the server that sent the mail to send on its behalf. That proof lives in a few records on the domain, which have names like SPF, DKIM and DMARC. You do not need to understand them. DMARC tells receiving mailboxes what to do with mail that fails the other two checks, and Gmail and Yahoo expect it from senders who mail in bulk. Ask whoever manages your domain, or your website developer, one question in these words:

"Are our SPF, DKIM and DMARC records set for every tool that sends mail as us, including the billing software and the mailer service?"

The usual trap is that a business moves to a bulk-mail service or a billing tool, and nobody tells the person who manages the domain. The tool then sends as you without permission, and the filter notices. One change of the records, made once, can fix it. Keep the answer in writing.

Step two: who is on the list?

Many small senders damage their reputation here, and not by malice. The list grew from visiting cards from an exhibition, an old phone's contacts, a purchased file or a scraped directory. Many of those people never asked to hear from you.

A mailbox watches what recipients do. If few open the mail, many delete it unread, and some press the report button, your address slides towards spam for everyone else on that list as well. So:

• Send to people who have bought from you, enquired, or asked to be on the list. Start there.
• Take out addresses that bounced, and people who have not opened anything you sent for a long stretch you choose.
• Never buy a list. Never send a first bulk mail to a file you did not build.
• Put one visible unsubscribe link in every mass mail, and honour it at once.

Our post on consent and marketing data covers the permission side in more detail. Rules for commercial messages differ and change, so read that post before a large send.

Step three: what does the message look like?

Only now does the wording count, and it counts as a pattern, not as a list of forbidden words. Filters read a message the way a tired clerk would: does it look like a person wrote it to one person?

A heavy attachment is a classic cause for the manufacturer who emails a full catalogue to everyone. Link to the catalogue page on your website instead.

For example: a laboratory-glassware dealer in Vadodara

This is an invented example. A dealer sends price lists to about four hundred college and research-lab purchase officers. Half the replies say "not received". The dealer sends from a free Gmail address, uses a bulk mailer, and attaches a twelve-megabyte price list to every message.

The ladder finds three separate faults, in order. The sending address is on nobody's domain, so the filters have nothing to trust. The list includes purchase officers who changed jobs, so mail bounces. The attachment is huge.

Put right, the dealer sends from a name on the firm's own domain, with its records set by the web developer. The bounced addresses are cleared out. The price list goes as a link to a page, not as an attachment. The next send reaches about nine in ten inboxes (invented figure), not all of them. A few institutions run strict filters of their own, and for those the dealer phones the purchase officer to allow the address. Setting up the records took the web developer an afternoon and a small fee.

When to stop doing this yourself

If you send a few quotations a day, the above is enough. If you send thousands of mails, or depend on email for most of your orders, the setup deserves a person who does it all the time. The same goes if several tools send on your behalf. That is email marketing work.

Skip bulk mail entirely, for now, if your list is under fifty people. A personal message from you, or a WhatsApp, does better than a mailer to a handful.

Run the four-address test this week

Send the test message today, note where it lands, and put the SPF, DKIM and DMARC question to whoever holds your domain. The rest of your marketing depends on knowing that your mail arrives. If you would like the list, the address and the sending tool sorted as one job, tell us what you need.