Top Reasons Your Emails Go to Spam & How to Fix It

It is so frustrating watching emails that you have put so much work into not being delivered to the person you wanted. If you have faced this problem of all of your emails ending up in spam, we are here today to help you fix it.

Imagine a situation- you have sent a really important email, no matter if it is business, school, or anything similar. It is important for you that the email is delivered to the person it is intended for. And it is sent, only to reach the person´s spam and not be seen.

Many emails do go to spam, even though they are not spam. It would be annoying to have to go through spam and check each email manually. Famous email services have spent a lot of time working with spam and finding a way to block them before It even reaches the inbox.

Gmail desktop app on MacBook.

This means they have come up with spam filters, filtering out any suspicious emails and only letting real, valid mails go through. But even that does not mean these kinds of problems are done happening, and some mails do end up in the spam folders, even though they are not.

In today´s article, we would like to give you a few reasons why you have this problem and the tools to help you resolve them. All of these are perfect for both personal uses and business emails.

1. The Content Seems Spammy

The first and most common problem that you might be facing is that the content of your email is spam-like.  That means you should always avoid keywords that might trigger the spam filter. There are literally lists online you can read of keywords you should always avoid when sending emails.

In case reviewing those lists didn’t help, try to ask someone else to write original drafts for your mails. These writers usually answer “please help me with my homework” requests, but also can write other content for anyone’s needs.

2. Lacking Authentication

Email on Phone

The second problem is lacking the right authentication. If you think of it this way when you are trying to reach someone over the phone if the person does not recognize your number, it is most likely they won’t even answer the phone. It is the same with emails. You should make sure your email is authenticated, and there are many technologies online to help you achieve this.

3. Weird Links

Links inside of your emails can also make them end up in the spam folder. If the link you have inside of your email leads to a suspicious link, your email will probably end up in spam. The reason for this is, most spam emails are used to lure you to certain sites.

They can also use URL shortening services to hide the spammy URL. For this reason, you should never include URLs in your emails if you are not 100% sure of their content.

4. Images

Photo pile

Another reason for your emails ending up in spam can be the use of too many images. Including images in your emails can be beneficial, but when done in the right way. There are two ways images can trigger the spam filter, the first one being: the image is too big, compared to the amount of text, or not having text at all.

This is because spammers started using single image files instead of all of the text, and now single images are suspicious to the servers. Another reason for this is that images sometimes do not load. This makes it even more suspicious for the servers observing your email.

An important thing to keep in mind is: when including images in your emails, make sure they are in the same or very similar ratio to the text in the email.

5. Attaching .exe Files

Attaching suspicious files can also easily cause your emails to end up in spam—especially file types like .exe.

6. Accidentally Being Market as Spam

Another not-so-common cause of this problem is that the person you are sending the email to has accidentally marked you as spam. In addition to this, if you are sending too many bulk emails, you can be on bad name and be marked as a spammer even though you are not.

This means other people who you have not previously contacted can even end up considering you to be spam and forwarding all of your emails to spam.

There are tons of other possible reasons for your problem, but these we have mentioned really are some of the most common ones. We want to present you with a few tools that might help you resolve your problem and help your emails reach the right person.

Best Tools to Remedy the Problem

1. Mail Tester

Mail Tester homepage

This is an awesome free tool that deals with technical issues when it comes to email deliverability. It is very simple to use, even if you are new to all of this. All you have to do is send the email (that might be getting flagged as spam for some reason) to the address given above.

Mail Tester analyses your email and gives you points on certain parts of it, and tells you why exactly your email might be getting stuck in the spam folder. If your overall score is low, you can help out is by applying certain tips given by the tool. This can up your email game by tons.

2. Litmus

Litmus homepage

Litmus is a combination of tons of optimization tools when it comes to everything email-related. It works a similar way the above-mentioned tool does; by scanning your mail and pointing out your mistakes and reasons, your emails might be ending up in spam.

By looking up your IP address, they can check if you have ended up on some blacklist and also make sure everything is okay with your authentication. And also, just like the one above, that score your email, pointing out your mistakes, and telling you what to do to improve your email game and get your emails out of other people’s spam folders.

3. IsNotSpam

IsNotSpam homepage

In case you do not want to invest in Litmus, IsNotSpam is an alternative for it. It is not as great as Litmus, but it will get the job done and give you the required information; that is, what is wrong with your email to be ending up marked as spam. Another thing not so great about it is the fact you have to check your emails manually.

Conclusion

When having this kind of problem, it is important to stay calm and not panic. Everything can be fixed once we realize what is causing the problem. Go through every one of the possible causes, and do some additional research online, in case the reason is not mentioned in this article.

We hope that you have found this article helpful and that it has given you a new point of view when it comes to emails and writing them successfully.