Issues are going to spam

Work down this list in order. It is sorted by how often each cause turns out to be the real one, and the first item exists because a good share of these turn out not to be a deliverability problem at all.

Nothing here is a setting to switch on. Sending works from signup, and the checks below are about what your domain says and how your list was built.

Is it going to spam for everybody, or for one reader?

One reader finding your issue in spam is a filter decision about their mailbox, not a verdict on your sending. Establish which of the two you have before changing anything.

The evidence is on the issue report. A healthy delivered figure with a click rate roughly in line with your last few issues is a newsletter arriving normally. A delivered figure that looks fine with clicks that have collapsed is the pattern worth investigating. Subscribe your own address on a couple of different providers and read the real issue there, rather than relying on a test send: a test send deliberately carries no unsubscribe headers and puts Test in the subject line, so it is filtered harder than the thing you are trying to measure.

Have the DKIM records verified?

DKIM is what lets a mailbox check that an issue really came from you, and a mailbox that cannot check a signature has nothing to go on but the reputation of the address in front of it.

What to check depends on who does the sending. While Issue Mint sends, your issues stay on our address until all five sending records verify, and they are signed either way, so an unverified record costs you your own name on the envelope rather than your delivery. On your own Amazon SES account, the three DKIM records are generated for you and sit on the domain tab waiting to be added, and mail goes out unsigned until they are there. On your own SMTP server, Issue Mint can neither generate nor check them, so SPF and DKIM are a conversation with your mail provider, and the domain tab says so rather than pretending to know.

DMARC is generated alongside them and is a suggestion rather than a requirement. Issue Mint never overwrites a policy you already have, and the suggested p=none is monitor-only, which does nothing to your mail on its own but is what makes the reports possible.

Is your from address on a domain you control?

An address at a free mailbox provider is the one from address that cannot work, and it is the fastest route into a spam folder there is.

Gmail, Yahoo and Microsoft all publish policies telling other mailboxes to reject mail claiming to be from their addresses and sent from somewhere else, so this is neither subtle nor occasional. On hosted sending the address is not editable and this cannot happen. On your own provider it is yours to set, and Issue Mint requires it to sit on the domain connected to your newsletter, for exactly this reason. Who your issues come from covers the rule and what a reader sees.

How was the list built, and when?

A bought, scraped or scraped-adjacent list produces bounces and complaints at a rate that damages the address you send from, whether that address is ours or your own sending account.

So does a genuine list that has been sitting untouched for two years, because a share of those mailboxes are gone and a share of the people have forgotten you. The numbers to look at are on the issue report: hosted sending pauses at a complaint rate of 0.1 per cent or a hard bounce rate of 5 per cent, with warnings well before either, and rates are not calculated at all below 500 delivered recipients because a percentage of twenty people is noise. If you are about to mail an old list for the first time, send to the people who have opened or clicked most recently first, and let the rest follow.

Is the sending address new?

A brand-new sending address has no reputation, and a large first send from one looks like a bought list from a mailbox provider’s side whether or not it is.

Hosted sending handles this for you: a new account may send 1,000 emails on its first day, and the ceiling doubles every clean week after that. A first hosted send above 2,000 recipients waits for one of us to look at it, once, which is the held first send. On your own sending account the ramp is yours to manage, and starting at a few hundred a day is the ordinary advice. The blog goes into the reasoning at more length than a troubleshooting page should.

What Issue Mint already does for you

Several of the things a deliverability checklist elsewhere will tell you to fix are already handled, so they are not worth your afternoon.

Every real issue carries a one-click unsubscribe header alongside the footer link, so a reader who wants out has a button in their mail client rather than a reason to press spam. Every issue carries a list header identifying your newsletter, which is what lets a mailbox file it as a subscription. Bounce notifications come back automatically and take dead addresses off your list without you noticing, which is what the two records on send are for once your issues move to your own domain. And the plain text version of every issue is written properly rather than being the HTML with its tags stripped out, which some readers prefer and which does no harm with the filters either.

Still stuck

Write to us with the newsletter, the issue and, if you have one, the full headers of a copy that landed in spam.

The headers are the part neither of us can guess at. They carry the receiving mailbox’s own verdict on the signature, the alignment and its own filtering, and that is a different quality of evidence from anything visible on either side of the send.