Email deliverability is effectively the rate of which your emails reach the Inbox of your recipients and not the Spam/Junk filters.
Not to be confused with Email Delivery which is whether your recipients mail-server will accept or reject your email.
Deliverability is influenced by many factors which does unfortunately make it slightly tricky to determine what may be causing mail to reach Spam/Junk however there are some basics that we should cover which include:
An SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record is a DNS record that servers will check against to see if the IP address trying to send mail to that server is actually permitted by the domain to do so.
Receiving Mailserver: “Hey <Domain>, is <IP Address> allowed to send Emails on behalf of your <Domain>?”
SPF Record: “Yes, go ahead and accept!” or “No! This is likely to be spam!”
SPF is enabled by default for domains using the ns1.ahcloud.co.uk and ns2.ahcloud.co.uk nameservers however if you are using your own nameservers or your domain name registrars nameservers then please ensure the Shared IP Address (as displayed in your cPanel interface) is included in your SPF record along with an “+a” value.
You can configure SPF Records in your cPanel under Email Deliverability
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is another method of verifying the email being sent or received is “real” and not spoofed.
When an email server receives an email, it will detect the DKIM signature and then compare this against the senders public DKIM record. If the record is found it is then decrypted and then compared against the original emails DKIM signature to see if it is a match – in which case it is determined to be “Valid”.
It is therefore just as important as the SPF Record to have a valid DKIM record for your domain name.
You can configure DKIM Records in your cPanel under Email Deliverability
Contact Forms on your website could be exploited by bots or malicious actors to send out spam from your own domain name!
We heavily recommend you add a CAPTCHA to every contact form you have to prevent this. Please note this may be enforced if your website is found to be sending out large amounts of unsolicited / unintentional email through a contact form being exploited.
Now, it may sound simple, but the content of your email really does matter. There are many spam detection algorithms in use by email providers to prevent spam.
If you are sending out emails with just a few words, or one link or even using “Test” as a subject, for example, this could well be detected as Spam by the recipients mail-server.
At a very minimum we’d recommend padding out your email with a “signature” to bump up the word count for those emails that might just naturally be quite short.
http://mail-tester.com/ – Test for general issues.
https://mxtoolbox.com/spf.aspx – Test your SPF Record is valid.
https://mxtoolbox.com/dkim.aspx – Test your DKIM record is valid.