Email service providers use many different techniques to filter spam. Spammers constantly adapt to these anti-spam measures, so email server administrators have to continually modify server configurations to help reduce spam. As a result, there is no single thing you can do to ensure that all of your outgoing messages are delivered successfully. You may find yourself often fighting the frustration of having your business emails getting classified as spam in your customer email boxes. The fact is that about 80-90% of All email on the internet is spam.
To stop the bombardment, people and businesses are creating filters or buying company services that filter email so that they receive only content that they deem relevant to them. So, whether or not your email is legitimate, if a receiving host or email spam program is aggressive or set a certain way, your emails could very easily get marked as spam. Unfortunately, most of the time this is not a server or hosting issue. This is a general issue with email that you will find no matter where you host your business emails. This article discusses what you can do from your end.
Is this an issue with our servers?
9 times out of 10, no? The only reason why your emails would be marked as spam due to us would be if the IP that is assigned to your server or the server that you are on is on an email blacklist. You can check this yourself by visiting this link and entering the IP address of your website/server/hosting account. If you do find the IP to be blacklisted, our team is most likely aware of it due to that fact that we do real-time comprehensive monitoring of our entire infrastructure but nevertheless, you can still submit a ticket with our support team for them to acknowledge this and provide you with an ETA or temporary workaround.
Steps to take when your emails are flagged as spam
There are several things that may help, but bear mind these are suggestions and not a guarantee that your email will no longer be filtered as spam:
Use a Dedicated IP for your account instead of the shared IP of the server. If you are on a Shared, Reseller or WordPress Hosting Plan by default you are given a Shared IP, which means that the IP is shared between you and other users on the same server. This at times can have potentially a negative impact on email deliverability due to the fact that the reputation of the IP is impacted by email that is being sent from every other user on the same server. There are some situations when some user, sharing the same IP address with you gets banned or blacklisted for spamming which may possibly affect your email service as well. Using a dedicated IP address for email isolates your service from the abuse consequences where others are at fault.
If possible, do not send HTML-only messages (send plain-text messages instead, or multi-part MIME messages with a text/plain component).
If you do send HTML-only messages, make sure they use valid HTML markup. You can use the W3C Markup Validation Service to test content (you can test a URL, upload a file, or paste HTML into a text box).
Send your customers a personal email message requesting that they white-list your domain so that your business emails don’t get filtered into Spam. In this, I’m referring to a “personal” email as one that doesn’t include your marketing links or business advertisements or enhancements that may flag the email as something other than a personal email.
Check to make sure that your Email Authentication is enabled. This helps stop spam coming from your email address (even if you’re not sending any that you know of). One of the common tactics by spammers out there is to spoof email coming from your domain. This causes you to get blacklisted even though you’re not sending emails. Here’s an article on these settings: Email Authentication – SPF and DomainKeys.
Setup SPF & DKIM for your domain.
Ultimately, you cannot force people to receive your emails or control how they perceive when an email is being labeled as spam or junk email. You can only control those factors that may lead your domain or email as being labeled as spam by observing the reaction to the emails that you send out.
