Why our emails were landing in junk folders, and what fixed it

For a good part of the autumn, a steady trickle of members told me they'd stopped getting notifications. I assumed they'd changed their settings. They hadn't. Our emails were going straight to junk, especially for people on the big free email providers, and I only found out because a member forwarded me a password reset that had landed there.

If you self-host a community, email is the part that fails silently. The site looks fine, the server is happy, and meanwhile half your welcome emails are never read. Here's what I changed.

Send from your own domain, properly

• SPF tells receiving servers which machines are allowed to send mail for your domain.
• DKIM signs each message, so receivers can check it wasn't altered on the way.
• DMARC tells receivers what to do when those checks fail, and sends you reports about it.

All three are DNS records. Ours were half set up, and the SPF record still listed a server we'd retired two years ago.

Stop sending from the web server

Our server had been sending mail directly, from an IP address with a poor reputation inherited from whoever used it before us. I moved all outgoing mail to a dedicated transactional email service and pointed UNA's mail settings at it. That single change made the biggest difference.

Make unsubscribing easy

Mail providers also watch how people react. If members can't find the unsubscribe link, they hit the spam button instead, and that hurts every email you send afterwards. We made the unsubscribe link obvious and stopped emailing accounts that hadn't opened anything in a year.

Three weeks on, the complaints have stopped and password resets arrive within seconds. If you run your own site, send a test email to an address at each of the big providers today and see where it lands. It takes five minutes and might explain a lot.