Client questions – Why do my website emails go into Google’s spam folders?

Dear Peter Mahoney:

I don’t know if you can help me with that but my team and I noticed that emails we send from our server go automatically in Spam on Gmail.

That email issue is pretty common actually. All receiving email servers have different rules about what counts as likely spam or not. Gmail is particularly strict.

It pays to do everything possible to keep them happy, which includes (but isn’t limited to):

• DNS records (both DKIM and SPF – sorry for the acronyms!)
• Don’t use a different ‘from’ address to the ‘return-to’ address
• If possible use a real email address to send, which might require you add an SMTP plugin for sending them on WordPress

And if nothing works, then consider using Google Suite for your own email. You can get plugins that will actually send email out from your site via your own Google Mail account, which is pretty fool-proof. That’s what I do myself.

Email, basically, sucks. It’s 30 years old and has barely changed in that time. It’s just levels of geekery added on top of something that was already hella nerdy.