why is my email going to spam, and how to stop it

When your own email starts landing in customers' spam folders, it feels random and personal. It is almost never either. Deliverability is a set of signals a receiving server checks, and legitimate mail usually fails on one specific, fixable thing rather than on some vague notion of 'reputation'. Here are the causes worth checking, in order.

Authentication: SPF, DKIM and DMARC

This is the first thing to check because it is the most common cause and the most fixable. These three DNS records prove your mail genuinely comes from you. Miss them, or get them subtly wrong, and every receiver treats your mail with suspicion — because from their side it looks exactly like a forgery.

• SPF lists the servers allowed to send as your domain. One record only — a second invalidates the first.
• DKIM cryptographically signs your mail so it cannot be tampered with in transit.
• DMARC tells receivers what to do when the other two fail, and reports back to you.

If you have not set these up, this is very likely your whole problem. We have a full walkthrough of getting them right, in the right order, without locking yourself out of your own mail.

Your content is tripping filters

Spam filters score the message itself, and legitimate mail can score badly by accident:

• A message that is one big image with almost no text — the classic spam shape.
• Link-heavy mail, especially with shortened URLs that hide their destination.
• Shouting subject lines: all caps, rows of exclamation marks, FREE, ACT NOW.
• A mismatch between the visible sender name and the actual sending address.

None of these alone will doom a message, but they stack. Plain, well-written mail with a sensible text-to-image balance scores well without any effort.

You are sending from the wrong place

A very common one: your website sends mail — contact forms, order confirmations — using its own server rather than your actual mail provider, so those messages are not covered by your SPF and DKIM. They fail authentication and land in spam even though your normal mail is fine. The fix is to send that mail through your real mail provider using authenticated SMTP, so it carries the same credentials as everything else.

Your IP or domain reputation is damaged

If none of the above applies, reputation is the next layer. A shared sending IP can be tarnished by another sender's behaviour, and a domain can land on a blocklist after a compromise or a careless bulk send. Check your domain against the major blocklists; if you are listed, each has a delisting process, but the cause has to be fixed first or you will simply be relisted.

The order to work through it

1. 01Confirm SPF, DKIM and DMARC are present and correct. This fixes most cases.
2. 02Check that your website's mail is sent through your mail provider, not the web server.
3. 03Look at the content of the messages that get filtered for the patterns above.
4. 04Check your domain and sending IP against blocklists, and start a delisting only after fixing the cause.

Deliverability rewards getting the boring configuration right. Once authentication is in place and your mail is sent from where it claims to be, legitimate email generally arrives — and stays arriving.