How Do I Get My Emails to Stop Going to Spam?

Last updated: October 2026

Most advice on this question hands you a pile of tips — avoid certain words, add more text, fewer images — and leaves you to guess which one mattered. For business email, the honest answer is shorter and more mechanical: receivers decide on proof first, history second, and content a distant third. So the fix has an order. Do these steps in sequence, test after each one, and stop when the test passes — most businesses are done by step 4.

Step 0: Test before you change anything

Send an email from your business address to a personal Gmail address you control. Open it, click the three dots, and choose "Show original." Note the three rows — SPF, DKIM, DMARC — and whether each says PASS beside your domain. Repeat the test sending from each tool that mails as you: your invoicing app, your newsletter platform, your website's contact form. Write down which senders pass and which fail. This five-minute inventory is the map for everything below, and it stops you fixing records that were never broken. (If your mail broke recently and worked before, our guide to emails going to spam all of a sudden narrows down what changed.)

Step 1: Fix SPF — one record, every sender, under the limit

Your domain needs exactly one SPF record, and it has to list every service allowed to send as you. Two records is a failure state, not extra safety. Merge everything into the single record, then count the DNS lookups the record triggers: SPF allows at most 10 (the limit is set by RFC 7208, the SPF standard), and some senders spend several lookups on a single include:. Over 10, SPF fails even for listed senders — the fix is in our too-many-lookups guide. Re-run the Step 0 test after publishing; DNS changes can take a little while to propagate, so give it an hour before judging.

Step 2: Turn on DKIM in every platform

DKIM is the digital signature that proves a message really came from an authorized platform and wasn't altered on the way. It is switched on inside each sending platform, not in one central place — and in both Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, signing for your own domain is a manual step that many setups never had taken. Each platform gives you DNS records to publish (usually CNAMEs); platforms like Mailchimp have their own shape to the process, covered in our Mailchimp DKIM setup guide. Work the list from your Step 0 inventory until every sender signs.

Step 3: Add DMARC — in stages, not all at once

DMARC ties SPF and DKIM together and tells receivers what to do with mail that fails both. Publish it first at p=none with a report address you actually read: that setting changes nothing about delivery, and the reports show you every service sending as your domain — including ones you forgot. After a week or two of clean reports, step up to p=quarantine, then p=reject. Jumping straight to reject is how businesses block their own invoices. The full sequence is in how to set up DMARC, step by step, and what each policy actually does.

Step 4: Re-test everything, from every sender

Repeat the Step 0 test for each sender in your inventory. You are done with the record work when every sender shows SPF PASS, DKIM PASS and DMARC PASS with your domain. For most small businesses, this is also where the spam problem ends — the mail that was filtering on failed proof now arrives with proof attached.

Step 5: If it still filters, work on reputation

When all three checks pass and mail still lands in spam, the remaining cause is reputation — the receivers' memory of your past sending. Check Google Postmaster Tools (free) for your domain's spam rate and reputation. Then do the unglamorous work: stop mailing addresses that never open, never mail a purchased list, remove bounces immediately, and keep your spam-complaint rate well under the 0.3% ceiling in Google and Yahoo's bulk-sender rules. Reputation recovers with consistent, wanted mail — it is measured in weeks, not hours, and no DNS record can shortcut it.

Step 6: Only now, look at content

Content is the last suspect, not the first: link shorteners, link text that doesn't match its destination, image-only emails with almost no text, and marketing mail with no working unsubscribe. Since February 2024, Google and Yahoo require bulk senders (5,000+ messages a day) to include one-click unsubscribe, and Microsoft adopted matching requirements in May 2025. Most small-business spam problems are solved long before this step — but if your records pass and your reputation is clean, this is what's left.

Worked in order — test, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, re-test, reputation, content — "my emails go to spam" stops being a mystery and becomes a checklist with an end. Our full guide to why business emails go to spam explains the reasoning behind each layer, if you want the deeper version.