How to Make Your Email Messages Look Less Like Spam

If your email messages look too much like spam, destination email providers might reject them or send them to the recipients’ Junk or Spam folders.

To make your email messages look less like spam to a destination email provider:

• In the email subject and body text, try not to have:

  • words and phrases commonly found in spam emails or test emails;

  • an abnormally short message containing just several words;

  • a single paragraph that’s abnormally long;

  • words in all uppercase when not using acronyms, both in the subject as well as the body text;

  • sentences that don’t begin with a capital letter each;

  • unusual grammatical structures;

  • unusual or missing punctuation;

  • space characters immediately before a comma, period, exclamation mark, question mark, colon, or semi-colon;

  • more than one space character after a comma, period, exclamation mark, question mark, colon, or semi-colon;

  • multiple empty lines between two paragraphs; or

  • one or more images yet very little text; or

  • large attachments (instead, use your email app’s cloud attachment feature, such as Apple Mail’s Mail Drop function, or manually create download links to the relevant files).

• When sending email from a domain hosted at HostM:

  • The email address in the ‘From’ field must be based on your actual hosted domain, not a domain hosted elsewhere.

  • When sending email using a desktop or mobile email app, ensure that your outgoing (SMTP) mail settings are set to the ones that we’ve provided, not the ones provided by any other party, such as your internet connection provider.

• If you’re sending an email message to more than a small handful of recipients, send a single copy per recipient, rather than a single copy to numerous recipients, especially when it comes to newsletters, mailing lists, etc.

  You may wish to use a mailing list app for this purpose, as it will typically handle this for you, or you could do it manually if preferred.

• If you’re sending out an HTML email using a web app, be sure to also include a fall-back plain text (non-HTML) version of the same message.

• When sending out a newsletter or message to a mailing list, always include a working one-click unsubscribe link at the bottom of the message. Most mailing list apps can be configured to handle this for you.

Your email should now look less like spam, and is less likely to be rejected by destination mail servers or be sent to the recipients’ Junk or Spam folders.