Our mail servers are configured to accurately determine wether a message is spam or not. Despite this, it is possible that a message you wanted to receive is marked as spam.
Besides this, messages you send yourself can also be marked as spam. This article covers several common causes and solutions.
A sent message is marked as spam
The most common cause is misconfigured DNS records on your domain. To send a message from our mailservers, it is most important that the correct SPF record is used.
An SPF record is a verification tool to determine if the server used to send mail for your domain is allowed to do so. To make sure sent emails are not maked as spam, the SPF record is therefore required.
Besides that, our mailservers use DKIM records to check the validity of the sender.
Because of these two reasons, check the DNS settings of your domain and make sure both the SPF- and the DKIM records are present.
If you are sending emails using an Email Only- or webhosting package, you can find the correct DNS records in the article 'The DNS settings of my Web Hosting'.
Are you using our mailservice in combination with a VPS? Check your settings using this manual.
When all DNS settings are configured correctly and a message is marked as spam, take a look at the content of the email. Spam filters scan the content of a message and give it a 'spam score' based on their findings. If the score is too high, the spam filter will view the message as a possible spam mail. The email will then arrive in the recipients spam box, or it will be blocked completely.
It is therefore important to keep a few things in mind regarding the content of your email:
- The subject: Always add a subject to your email message and make sure it describes the content of the mail. Avoid using words that could be filtered out by a spamfilter, such as 'test'.
- A balance between tekst and image(s): When your email consists of only an image or mostly images, it is possible that this is seen as spam. Make sure the majority of your email is text. The more images you use, the more text you need to add.
- Images hosted at a large firm: To prevent phising, images hosted by well known companies are often marked as spam. Examples of such companies are social media or hosting companies. It is best practice to delete such images, or replace them with images you host yourself.
If the content of your email complies with the above, check if your email client or plugin uses the settings below:
- 'From' and 'Reply-to': Spammers often use a different 'Reply-to' address than the sending email address to phish for information. If your 'From' and 'Reply-to' addresses are the same, you will avoid triggering spam filters.
- 'Envelope-from' and 'From': The same goes for the 'Envelope-from' and 'From' addresses. The 'Envelope-from' is what mailservers see as the sender, 'From' is what the recipient of the email sees as the sender. To not be marked as spam, it is best to have these two addresses be the same email address.
Attention: If you are sending emails via an external company, contact them when your emails are marked as spam. They can help you solve or avoid your spam issues.
If the tips on this page are not enough to solve the issue, our supporters can check for you why the email is marked as spam by the spam filter. You can reach them via the 'Contact' button in your control panel.
Make sure you include the following information in your message:
- The exact time at which you tried to send the e-mail.
- The sending email address.
- The receiving email address.
A received message is marked as spam
There can be several reasons for when a message you expected is blocked or received in your spam box. In many cases only the sender of the email can solve this. The most common reasons are:
- The content of the mail: Messages can be marked as spam due to their content. Messages containting only an image, no text, or a subject such as 'test' will often trigger a spamfilter.
- SPF record: When the SPF record is missing or incorrect, the likelyhood of the message not getting through is significantly higher.
- HTML and text are different: Mail ususally contains html and plain text. It is possible that the content of both differ. This is something spammers use often to hide the fact that they are sending spam. Though, it can also be an error in the sender's mail client.
- Spam database: Het is possible that someone is sending emails that are marked as spam often. The result of sending spam (be it intentional or unintentional) can be that the sending email address and mailserver are listed in a spam database. This means all other messages sent from the address or server are automatically marked as spam.
The sender of the mail can try to solve this by altering their message where possible based on the pointers listed in this article.
In this article we explained what you can do when your sent or received mails are marked as spam.