Why your business emails land in spam and how to check

Say you run a pool repair company in Boca Raton, Florida, and send a quote on a Tuesday afternoon in June, when every homeowner on the street is getting ready for hurricane season, or you fit kitchens in Stockport and email an invoice on a wet Friday before the weekend. The customer says they'll look it over, and then you hear nothing. You assume they went with someone cheaper. Quite often the quote is sitting in their spam folder next to the parcel delivery scams, and neither of you ever finds out. Emails going to spam rarely produce an error on your side, because the message did leave your outbox. It was judged when it arrived and quietly filed away, so from where you sit everything looks fine.

That's why this problem lasts for months. In our scan of 2,163 US AV integrators, 708 firms had email problems, ranging from businesses running everything through a free mailbox to domains whose mail setup was broken outright. These are established companies that send quotes and invoices every week, and nothing on the sender's side would have warned them.

The good news is that most of it can be checked by the owner in an afternoon, and the fixes are usually small once you know where to look.

• Firms scanned2,163 count
• Firms with email problems708 count

Source: Pixedi scan of US AV integrators

Why receiving servers get suspicious of your mail

Anyone can type any address into the "from" line of an email, which is exactly how scammers pretend to be your bank. So when your message reaches a customer's mail provider, the provider looks for proof that it really came from your business. That proof lives in your domain settings (often called DNS), which is the control panel at the company where you bought your domain name. Those settings tell the internet where your website lives and which servers are allowed to send mail for you.

If the proof is missing or contradicts itself, the receiving server has to guess, and a cautious guess means the spam folder. Wording can play a part too, like an all-caps subject line or an email that's only a link, but for businesses we usually find the setup is the bigger cause.

How to tell if your emails going to spam is a setup problem

Start with a simple test. From your normal business address, send a short email to a personal address you own at one of the big free email providers, and to a friend or colleague who uses a different provider. Write it like a real message with a sentence or two, since an empty test email can be filtered for its own reasons.

Then check two things. First, did it land in the inbox or in spam? Second, open the message and look for an option called "show original" or "message details" (it's usually in the menu with the three dots or under "more"). You'll see a block of technical lines near the top. Look for the words "pass" or "fail" next to the authentication checks.

What good looks like: every check says pass. If you see anything other than pass, your domain isn't proving who it is, and that's worth fixing before anything else.

The sender list: who is allowed to send for you

The first record receiving servers look for is the sender list, known as SPF. It's a single line in your domain settings that names every service allowed to send mail using your domain. Your main mailbox provider is on it, and so should be anything else that sends as you.

This is where things drift. A business sets up email, and the record is correct on day one. Then someone adds invoicing software that emails customers, a contact form on the website, a booking tool and a newsletter service. Each one sends mail "from" your domain, and if nobody adds it to the sender list, those messages look forged to the receiving server. It often happens in a hurry, like a Florida contractor who signs up for a new booking tool the week after a storm knocks out power and the phones are ringing nonstop. Another common mistake is having two separate SPF records, which most servers treat as broken.

To check, search for any free "SPF record check" tool and type in your domain. Good looks like exactly one record, starting with v=spf1, that lists every service you know sends mail for you. If you can name a tool that emails your customers and it isn't on the list, that's your gap.

The signature and the policy

The second piece is a digital signature, called DKIM. Your mail provider attaches a hidden signature to every message, and you publish the matching key in your domain settings so receivers can confirm the email wasn't altered on the way. Most providers offer this, but it often has to be switched on by hand, and in our experience it's frequently left off. Look in your mail provider's admin settings for "authentication" or "DKIM" and follow its steps.

The third piece is a policy record, called DMARC. It tells receiving servers what to do with mail that fails the other checks, and it can send you reports showing who is sending email using your domain, including people who shouldn't be. Good looks like a record at _dmarc.yourdomain.com. Starting with a policy of p=none is fine, since it only collects reports, and once those reports look clean you can tighten it so forged mail gets rejected.

Free mailboxes and shared inboxes

Sending quotes from a free webmail address is common, especially for owners who started on their own, like a dock builder in Fort Lauderdale or an electrician in Salford who set up the address on their phone the week they went independent. The trouble is that you can't publish any of the records above for a free address, because you don't own the domain. Customers also trust it less on sight, and if the person using it leaves, the history of every customer conversation leaves with them. Moving to an address on your own domain is the single biggest improvement for most of these businesses.

Generic inboxes like info@ or office@ are a different issue. They're fine for receiving mail, but a quote sent from one with no name attached reads like a form letter, and if nobody checks that inbox daily, customer replies sit there unanswered. We'd suggest sending quotes and invoices from a named address on your domain and keeping the generic one for incoming inquiries, with someone clearly responsible for reading it.

A short checklist for this week

1. Send a real test email from your business address to a personal free address and to someone on a different provider, and note whether it lands in the inbox.
2. Open the original details of that message and confirm every authentication line says pass.
3. Run your domain through a free SPF check and make sure there's exactly one record that includes every service that emails customers for you.
4. In your mail provider's admin settings, confirm the DKIM signature is switched on.
5. Check that a DMARC record exists for your domain, even if it's set to p=none for now.
6. If quotes go out from a free mailbox or a generic inbox, plan the move to a named address on your own domain.

How Pixedi handles this in Care

Email health is part of our Care plan, which is $250 a month. When we start, we check your domain's mail records and the addresses you send from, then fix what's broken with your sign-off. We recheck every month, so a new invoicing tool or a hosting change doesn't quietly undo the work, and anything we found or changed is listed in your one-page monthly report.

Your next step

Before you send your next quote, send one test email from your business address to a personal address, open "show original", and look for the word pass beside each check. If any line says fail or none, start with the sender list section above and work down the checklist from there.

Ask AI about this article

Opens the assistant in a new tab with this page as the source.

ChatGPTClaudePerplexityGemini