You are reading this article because you are either:
1. Sending out emails but the recipients are saying that they are not receiving them or they are going into their spam folder.
2. People are sending you emails and they are going into your spam folder.
Why do emails go to spam?
When you send an email to someone, the email traverses, digitally across the internet through multiple points (sometimes 20+) and ends up in the email system of the recipients.
If the recipient's email server does spam filtering or is having load issues or your domain name is not configured correctly, then there is a distinct possibility that your email could be affected and either go to their (or yours) spam folders, get lost on their system or simply bounce.
Below are some pointers to help you understand and troubleshoot as to why emails being sent to YOU might be going to your spam folder.
First, we will tell you a quick story, bear with us, it's an example of a typical scenario.
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You sent a package to a client via courier but the client is not receiving the package. The next day you call the client and ask them about the package and they say they did not get it. You ask the courier and the courier says "yeah, I delivered it to the reception of the hotel and gave it to the concierge". You then speak to the hotel manager, who says it's very strange because other people are delivering packages all day, it must be the courier's fault. So again, you go back to the courier and he presents you with a signed document from the concierge of the hotel saying it was received. So definitely was received at the hotel but the client did not receive it. Why not? You then ask the hotel manager to check his reception videos and when they review the video they can see that the concierge, for no real reason, put the package in the trash just after he received it. |
Step 1 - Turn off spam filtering in your email client!
Clients will tell us "email went to spam" but what they don't tell us is if the email was filtered by the mail server or their very own email client like Outlook or Mac Mail.
If you are a client of JUCRA, you DO NOT NEED Spam filtering turned on in Outlook or Mac Mail.
Here is how to turn off spam filtering in Outlook
Here is how to turn off spam filtering in Mac Mail
Once you have eliminated the issue of your email client filtering emails, if the email is still going to spam, attention can be turned to the mail server itself.
Step 2 - Whitelist senders on the mail server
If you are seeing emails going to spam AFTER you turn off spam filtering in Outlook or Mac Mail, then you should "whitelist" the sender in your mail server whitelist if you do not want them to go to spam.
Here is how to whitelist sender with JUCRA mail
Bonus Step - Test the spamminess of your email
Whitelisting will usually solve the issue of emails going to spam, but another thing you can do is if your emails are going into spam folders, then possibly it could be a configuration issue with your own domain or the contents of the email itself.
Here is how to test the spamminess of your emails.
Further spam troubleshooting
Below is a troubleshooting process you should follow when you encounter any of the following situations.
- email was not received by the recipient
- email went to the recipients spam folder on their server
- email went to the recipients spam folder on their email client (like outlook/mac mail/thunderbird etc)
- email bounced (ie you received a message back saying that your email could not be delivered)
From our side, we can only control the outcome of ITEM A when the email bounces, the rest of the process falls to the recipient of the email because once a message leaves our server, the rest of the delivery process falls on the destination server where we have no control at all, so in all cases the recipient will need to do something to let your emails through.
There is also the human aspect whereby a person will tell you the email was in their spam folder, but in fact, they simply ignored the email and easy to put blame on the email server.
