Today’s topic is: how to keep your website emails out of the spam folder.
It’s very important.
If you send an email to a client, and it goes to their spam folder, and they never get it, it could cause problems for you. So let’s look at how to avoid spam filters.
Whether you’re using a third-party form plugin or you’re using a form that’s built into the page builder you’re using, then you might be testing out the form or you built the client’s site and your clients are saying, “Hey, I’m not getting the notifications when customers are filling out my form. What’s going on?”
They’ll often check and see that it’s in their spam folder. And you might wonder how to get past that.
There are a couple of things that could be causing the emails you send to go into the recipient’s spam folder.
One is if you’re on cheap hosting, more than likely your email will go into the spam folder. However, even if you’re on really good hosting, a dedicated server, or a really expensive managed host, your email can still potentially go to spam.
The way it works is WordPress has a WP Mail function that uses PHP Mail to send the email. So your web server is sending the email.
Web servers are optimised for serving web pages as quickly as possible. They’re not optimised for sending out emails. They can do it and obviously, but it’s not best to do it that way.
The best practice is to outsource that email sending to an email sending service that specialises in sending emails. They’re optimised for sending emails. They’re coming from different IP addresses. This is called a transactional email service.
There are a few different ones that we recommend: SendGrid, Mandrill, and Mailgun. Alternatively, if you use Office 365 or Google Workspace you could have that service handle your website’s outgoing email
They specialise in sending out those emails from your website. So this could be anything from contact form emails to password reset emails that WordPress sends out. If you’re on an e-commerce site: email receipts and email sale notifications that go out to the customer and then the sale notifications that go to you. It’s all email that WordPress would normally be sending through PHP Mail with the web server. The transactional email service will intercept it and send it through their servers that are optimised for sending emails.
You can get some reporting too. You can look at deliverability and open rates. So it’s just a much better system to keep
your emails from going to spam.
So that’s how to keep your website emails out of the spam folder: use a transactional email service. Super easy and works.