Your enquiry emails land in spam: how to fix it

Enquiry emails land in spam when your domain cannot prove it authorised the message. Three DNS records fix most cases, they are free, and adding them is mostly copy and paste from your email provider.

The rest of the problem is usually a contact form claiming to send as the visitor, which is a settings change taking two minutes.

Why this happens

Email was designed without any check on who a message claims to be from. Anyone can send mail saying it comes from your domain, which is why spam and phishing work at all.

Mail providers responded by checking three things. If your domain has not set them up, your genuine mail looks exactly like a forgery, and it gets filed accordingly.

SPF lists which servers are allowed to send email for your domain.

DKIM adds a cryptographic signature proving the message came from you and was not tampered with.

DMARC tells receiving providers what to do when a message fails the first two, and asks them to report back.

None of them are optional any more. Large providers have tightened requirements considerably in recent years, and mail from domains without proper authentication increasingly gets junked rather than delivered.

Fixing it

The contact form half of the problem

Separate cause, same symptom, and worth checking even after the DNS is right.

Many contact forms are configured to send with the visitor’s email address in the From field, so replies go to the right place. Sensible in intent, and technically it means your web server is claiming to send on behalf of gmail.com or wherever, which it has no authority to do.

The fix: set the From address to something at your own domain, like website@yourbusiness.co.uk, and put the visitor’s address in reply-to. Replies still reach them, and the message now passes authentication.

Contact form not sending emails covers the wider set of form delivery problems.

Other things that push mail toward spam

Once authentication is right, these are the remaining contributors:

Sending through the web server. Web servers have poor sending reputations, often because of other sites sharing them. Routing mail through a proper sending service fixes this and is free at small business volumes.

Free email addresses in the From field. A form sending as yourbusiness@gmail.com from your website’s server fails checks that a proper domain address would pass.

Spam trigger words in the subject. Less significant than authentication, but “URGENT” and excessive capitals do not help.

No history. A brand new domain sending mail has no reputation, and reputation builds over weeks of normal sending.

What this costs you while broken

Worth stating plainly, because this is easy to leave alone.

Every enquiry filed as spam is a customer who thinks you ignored them. They do not ring back. They go to whoever replied, and you never learn it happened.

A business getting six enquiries a month at £400 a job loses £2,400 a month, silently, for as long as this continues. Businesses regularly discover it after a year.

Check both directions

While you are looking at this, also check that mail you send reaches people. The same records affect your outgoing quotes and invoices, and a quote landing in a customer’s junk folder costs you the same job.

Send yourself a test to a Gmail address and to an Outlook address, and check both inboxes and both spam folders.

Background in why emails land in spam and SPF, DKIM and DMARC explained.

If you would rather not touch DNS records, our managed plans include email authentication setup and monitoring from £49 a month. Or send us your domain and we will tell you free which of the three records is missing, since the check takes us two minutes and plenty of people fix it themselves from there.