What to do when your email is going to the spam folder of the person you are sending to or not being delivered.
Emails (business mail and excluding newsletters & mass mailers) for my users get send to spam folders mainly for 4 reasons :
#1 – THE MAIL SERVER
The setup of the mail server and what it allows its users to do determine the “credibility” or spam history of the server. in order to protect our server “good name” we:
- Require mail users to log in with a valid username & password before sending an email.
- We do not allow users to send more than 500 emails per hour.
- We monitor our server IP & name on all available blacklists to take preventative action when a problem does happen.
#2 – EMAIL CONTENT (DO’S & DON’T)
- Send the same mail to less than 50 people at a time
- Send less than 500 emails per hour (we have a newsletter service that uses an external gateway to safely send thousands of emails without effecting the server and our mail users).
- Convert attachments (Word & Excel) to PDF before sending (more & more servers will not accept word & excel files due to virus infections)
- Upload files and mostly large files to online storage like dropbox & send a link.
- Don’t forward emails marked as Spam
- Make sure you have Antivirus AND Anti-malware software on your computers.
#3 – YOUR OUTGOING IP
Every computer on the internet is linked to an IP address (it like a phone number) which is used to track where a message was sent from. That IP is allocated to your computer or the network you are working on by your ISP and can change after a certain period.
To get your IP, search on Google, “what is my IP”.
Now if a computer on your network gets infected with malware and start to send a 100 000 emails, the internet will look at the IP and add that address to a blacklist and most mail servers will check and update their blacklist settings.
If an email is received the mail server will check if the sending computer is working on a blacklisted IP. That mail server can then decide to:
- Refuse to accept the email
- Mark the email as SPAM to warn the receiver, but still, send the email
- Move the email to the receivers SPAM folder.
If you find out that your emails are not being delivered or moved to the receivers SPAM folder:
- Check your IP by searching on Google, “what is my IP”.
- Copy that IP address and search on a blacklist IP website if your IP was blacklisted. I use MXToolbox
If your IP is listed, contact your ISP to get the IP removed.
