Deliverability guide
The nine reasons email lands in spam, most common first, and how to find and fix yours in a few minutes.
Most email lands in spam for one of a handful of reasons, and the first three are technical problems you can see straight away. Run your domain through the full domain scan: it checks SPF, DKIM, DMARC and blacklists and tells you which one is failing.
SPF, DKIM or DMARC is missing or broken. Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook expect all three. Without them your email looks unverified. Fix with the SPF checker, DKIM checker and DMARC lookup.
Your domain or inboxes are new. New senders have no reputation. Warm up for about three weeks before sending at volume.
You send too much, too fast. A sudden jump in volume looks like spam. Keep to about 30 cold emails per inbox a day; the cold email calculator shows how many inboxes you need.
People mark your email as spam. Gmail starts filtering you once complaints pass about 0.3%. Send only to people who’d expect to hear from you, and make unsubscribing easy.
Your list has dead addresses or spam traps. High bounces and traps damage your reputation fast. Clean the list before sending; see soft bounce vs hard bounce.
Your server or domain is on a blacklist. Run the blacklist check.
The email itself looks like marketing. Lots of links, big images, link shorteners, attachments or pushy wording all add up. Plain, short emails do best.
There’s no easy way to opt out. Bulk senders now need a one-click unsubscribe. See the List-Unsubscribe header.
You send from a free Gmail or Outlook address. Business sending from free addresses is filtered hard. Use your own domain.
Find your reason
One scan checks SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MX and blacklists and lists what to fix first.
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