An e-mail lands in spam for three kinds of reason: the domain is not authenticated, the message looks like spam, or the sending behaviour looks like a spammer's. The first is solved once and stays solved. The other two are habits.
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The foundation: before touching wording or lists, make sure the domain has SPF, DKIM and DMARC in place. Without them nothing else saves the message — it is explained in SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
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Behaviour: what the receiving server is judging
| Do |
Avoid |
| Send from a real address on your domain |
Putting an address that is not yours in the From, or a Gmail pretending to be the domain |
| Keep a steady rhythm |
Going quiet for months then firing 400 messages in one afternoon — the classic compromised-account pattern |
| Reply within existing conversations |
Starting every contact from scratch to addresses that never wrote to you |
| Clean out addresses that bounce |
Keeping on at addresses that no longer exist — repeated bounces wreck a domain's reputation |
| Sign with name, company and contact |
Messages with no signature at all, which is how spam usually arrives |
Recipients: where it goes wrong fastest
| 1 |
Write to people who know you. A bought list is the quickest way to burn a new domain, and there is no undoing it afterwards.
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| 2 |
Never put dozens of people in To or Cc. Besides exposing everyone's address to everyone else, it is a strong bulk-sending signal. Use Bcc — or better, send one message per person.
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| 3 |
If it is a newsletter, treat it as one. It needs a visible, working unsubscribe, and it should only go to people who asked for it.
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| 4 |
Check the addresses before sending. Typos cause bounces, and too many bounces make you look like a machine guessing addresses.
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The message: what makes a filter suspicious
| Signal |
How to fix it |
| Subject in ALL CAPS or with !!! |
Write the subject as you would in a letter: clear, without shouting |
| Hard-sell words |
"FREE", "URGENT", "CLICK NOW", "MAKE MONEY" — exactly the spam vocabulary. Say the same thing differently |
| The message is one big image |
An e-mail with no real text, just a poster, is a spam signature. Put the essentials in text |
| Many links, or shortened links |
Few links, all to your own domain. Shorteners hide the destination — and filters know it |
| Executable or compressed attachments |
No .exe files, and avoid .zip. Put the file behind a link instead of attaching it |
| Written in a language the recipient does not use |
Write in the reader's language — out-of-context text scores badly |
Limits: ours, and the ones that actually count
On our side we do not impose a hard ceiling of messages per hour, and that is not a licence for bulk sending. The limit that decides whether your message arrives is not ours: it is the receiving server's, and that one is published nowhere — it adapts to your domain's reputation, day by day.
| Limit |
What to bear in mind |
| Messages per hour |
No fixed ceiling on our side. But a sudden spike from shared hosting makes the whole server look suspicious — which hurts your neighbours and you |
| Recipients per message |
Technically many fit; in practice, more than a few dozen in Bcc already looks like bulk mail. Split it up |
| Attachment size |
Our server accepts large messages, but the recipient decides — most services cut off near 25 MB. For heavy files, send a link |
| Sending from your own mailbox |
Fine for conversations. For campaigns, use a proper bulk-mail tool that handles unsubscribes and reputation |
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Something that protects everyone: we also scan the mail that leaves the server. It is not to police you — it is because one compromised account firing out spam is enough to put the whole server on blacklists, and then nobody's mail arrives. If an account of yours is used that way, we tell you.
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For internal lists: cPanel includes Mailing Lists, which works well for closed groups (your team, the partners, a class). It is not a marketing-campaign tool — for that, a dedicated platform pays for itself.
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Test before sending for real
| 1 |
Send the message to an address of yours at another provider (a Gmail, an Outlook.com) and see where it lands.
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| 2 |
If it lands in spam, open it and look for whether the service states a reason — many do.
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| 3 |
Fix one thing at a time and repeat. Changing five things at once tells you nothing about which was the problem.
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If it still lands in spam after that, write to us — we can read the outbound log and tell you what the other side replied. And if your problem is the reverse, spam arriving in your mailbox, see how to stop spam reaching your mailbox.
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Your messages still landing in customers' spam?
Talk to us
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