How to help ensure sent email doesn’t end up in a spam folder

We’ve probably all experienced a time when we’ve been waiting for an important email to arrive, and cursed the email sender, only to find that the email, for some inexplicable reason has ended up in a spam folder.

The truth is that there is an awful lot of spam being sent. To try and combat this, email providers such as Microsoft and Google constantly evolve their opinion on what they consider spam, to the extent that genuine email is ending up in spam folders more frequently.

Whilst it is not possible to guarantee an email will end up in the recipient’s inbox, unless of course, they have whitelisted your email address, there are measures you can put in place to improve email deliverability.

Add an SPF, DKIM and DMARC record

Properly implemented SPF, DKIM and DMARC records provide a way to validate that an organisation delivering an email has the right to do so. They are designed to give email domain owners the ability to protect their domain from unauthorized use, commonly known as email spoofing

Include links to documents rather than add as an attachment

Attaching files to your emails, like Word documents or PDFs, can trigger spam alert systems. You can prevent this by providing a web-accessible link to the file in your email.

Avoid embedding forms

Embedding forms in your email is likely to be flagged by spam filters. Forms represent a security risk and aren’t usually supported across common email clients.

Instead of including embedded forms, you should either link to the page you wish recipients to visit, or insert a call-to-action button.

Test the spammyness of your email

Once you have implemented the above, you can test how “spammy” your email is by visiting https://www.mail-tester.com/