Itwerx is a service-disabled veteran-owned managed IT provider serving businesses across Seattle, Bellevue and Snohomish County since 2005. This is why legitimate company mail ends up in spam folders, and what can be done about it.
If you run a business you send a lot of email – newsletters, marketing, project updates – some through a third-party service like Mailchimp or HubSpot, some sent “in house,” and most businesses land somewhere in between. Sometimes that mail gets blocked as spam, and the usual advice stops short of explaining why.
The technical checklist everyone already gives you
Ask any IT person and you will get a familiar list: DMARC, DKIM, SPF and PTR records on the more technical side; HTML formatting, message-volume pacing and keyword avoidance on the less technical side. All of it is genuinely necessary. None of it is the part that most often gets left out of the conversation.
The part that gets left out: IP reputation
Spammers used to spin up disposable “spam machines” on free hosting trials and compromised home systems, blasting away until they were shut down. That history is where the idea of “IP reputation” comes from: a spam score, built from many signals, weighs heavily on where a message actually came from and whether that sending IP has a history of bad behavior.
The complication is that almost every business now sends mail through a hosted service, and every hosting provider, including the largest ones, has only a small pool of IPs handling email for a very large number of customers. Spam filters cannot whitelist that pool, because that would give every spammer sharing it a free pass. They cannot blacklist it either, because too many legitimate senders share the same small range. Hosts, for their part, are reluctant to terminate paying accounts over it.
The result is a standoff: filters keep accepting the mail while quietly turning the reputation dial up and down, until the host addresses whichever bad actor is sharing the pool that week. Your message’s fate ends up depending, in part, on what a stranger on the same IP range did that week or month – a factor entirely outside your control.
The fix, and it is a cheap one
An outbound relay service, which most spam-filtering providers already offer, filters your outbound mail before it leaves and is treated as considerably more trustworthy as a result. If your delivery rates have quietly gotten worse and nothing about your own practices has changed, this is a cheap and easy thing to check before assuming the problem is something you did.
Itwerx Corp is a service-disabled veteran-owned small business providing IT services across Seattle, Bellevue, Everett and Snohomish County. This is the kind of thing our managed IT services work deals with – talk to us about yours.
