Sometimes your emails can wrongly be delivered to your recipients to their Spam / Junk folders. There can be many reasons for this, some of which we'll explore shortly in this article.
What we do as a hosting provider to improve email deliverability
- Setup DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) and SPF (Sender Policy Framework) authentication by default for all domains to help verify that the emails are being sent from a trusted sender. This also protects your domain from being used for email spoofing.
- To assure that DKIM and SPF are enabled for your domain, please follow this guide: How to increase email deliverability and prevent spoofing - Maxer
- Furthermore, you can add DMARC records for your domain to enhance deliverability even more by following this guide: How to create a DMARC record - Maxer
- Setup PTR records for all our servers' hostname
- Limit the maximum number of emails that each domain can send per hour and queue outgoing messages for later delivery after a domain reaches its limit.
- Prevent the user "nobody" from sending emails. Only authenticated users can send emails through our servers so we can track down any possible abuse.
- To enable email authentication for outgoing emails, please follow this guide: How to enable SMTP Authentication if you cannot send emails - Maxer
- Allow a maximum percentage of failed or deferred messages that a domain may send per hour.
- Disable features and functions that often lead to blacklisting.
- Monitor and prevent abusive activities on our network.
- Monitor our servers' mail queues and proactively react to suspicious activities.
- Check if our IP addresses are blacklisted in major Real-Time Blacklists (RBLs) on a regular basis and assure that we maintain a clean IP reputation.
Common reasons why your emails are filtered or rejected
If it is only Yahoo! Mail you are having problems with, ensure that you have DomainKeys (DKIM) enabled on in your account. To enable DKIM, please follow our guide: How to increase email deliverability and prevent spoofing - Maxer
Other common reasons why an email can be rated as spam:
- Your recipients have flagged your emails as spam
- Your subject line contains one or more words that trigger spam filters
- Example: Your email subject starts with "RE: " or "FW: " even though you're not forwarding or replying to an email
- Your email body (the actual message) contains spammy words such as "free", "easy money", "sale", etc.
- Your email doesn't follow HTML best practices
- When using HTML format in your emails, make sure that the content is coded correctly and can display properly.
- Your "From" recipient is incorrect
- If you have the option to define the sender email, make sure that it matches your actual email account or at least your domain.
- Your email contains attachments
- If you must attach files to your email, please make sure to resume to the safe formats (i.e., jpeg, png, gif, txt, etc.) and try not to send executable formats (i.e., exe, xls, doc, etc.).
- If you must send executable formats, make sure to pack those files into an archive (e.g., zip, rar, tar).
- Your domain may be blacklisted. Make sure your domain isn't marked as unsafe.
- Check for your domain in RBLs, such as Google Safe Browsing or Email Blacklist Check by mxtoolbox.com
- Your email doesn't contain an unsubscribe link
- If you send promotional or marketing emails (or if your emails may look like that), please always make sure to add an email signature and a functioning link to unsubscribe, and adhere to all marketing guidelines.
These are just a few frequent reasons why emails may get flagged as spam. For a more specific technical analysis, you can send us concrete information to investigate (sent email including email headers and source of the body message, bounce-back messages, etc.). However, please note that we are not responsible for and cannot control the policies of the recipient servers. It is completely up to their systems how emails are rated and filtered.
IP Reputation and RBL Listings
If the IP address of the server on which your hosting account is hosted happens to be blacklisted, we would immediately request the delisting and investigate for any suspicious activities or compromised accounts that may be abusing our server. This is when our Abuse Department intervenes and cleans up the reputation of our server and its IP allocation. This usually takes from a few minutes to a few hours, depending on how fast our delisting request is handled. If you notice that one of our IPs is blacklisted in any major RBL, please contact our support department.
Updated by SP on 08/12/2022
