Are your Gsuite emails going to spam and thinking why this is happening to you? Are you having those awkward conversations where clients and suppliers are saying they aren’t getting your emails only to find them in their spam box? Are you starting to get worried that you are looking unprofessional if all your mails go to spam?

Then you are in the right place and let me just say, you are not alone and don’t panic – there are solutions!

Blacklisted

First things first, let’s just double check that your domain isn’t blacklisted before continuing onto some practical steps to assist with authenticating your email domain.

Did you know that the amount of daily spam emails being sent can be anywhere between 80 to 95% of all emails sent on the internet that day? Obviously email clients are trying to minimise the amount of spam you receive so they implement their own spam filters which sometimes can flag your email as spam despite you never sending a spam email in your life. If you are flagged as a domain that sends too many spam emails then you are blacklisted.

So what is a blacklist? A blacklist is a list of blocked domains, email addresses or IP addresses. When a website gets on one of these lists, users can no longer access the site directly and servers that use these blacklists will block emails from the domain.

So how do you find out if your domain is on that list? Well I like using this nifty free tool which we are going to also use to authenticate your email domain: mail-tester.com

Send a test mail to the email address they provide and get your results. Once you have your results scroll down to the second last tab and see if you are blacklisted or not.

  • If you are blacklisted then you are going to need to use different tools recommended in the tab to remove your domain from the specific blacklist you are on before proceeding.
  • If you are clear then we can move on to authenticating your domain.

How to avoid your Gsuite emails going to spam

Authenticating your domain

This is the simplest and easiest way to rectify your email from going to spam. This should always be done for any business domain and only takes about 15 minutes of your time as long as you have access to your domain and email hosting.

So you are going to use the results you generated in in your mail-tester.com report to help you walk through the authentication process. Scroll to the third tab in your report and if it says “You’re not fully authenticated” we have some work to do. Simply put we need to add three protocols to where your domain and website is hosted:

  • SPF
  • DKIM
  • DMARC

Adding your SPF record

In your mail-tester.com report it will provide you with the TXT record you need to add to your DNS settings.

  1. Login to your hosting and go to your DNS settings
  2. Add a new TXT record
  3. Host record should be: @
  4. The SPF TXT record value should be: v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all
  5. Sometimes you need to add quotation marks before and after your TXT record depending on your host.

Adding your DKIM record

Since we are using GSuite we are going to use this guide found here.

Essentially what you need to do is:

  1. Login to your Google Admin account
  2. Go to apps and then click Gmail
  3. Then you are going to click authenticate email
  4. Select the domain you want to authenticate and click generate new record
  5. Copy the record generate and go to your hosting to your DNS settings
  6. Add a new TXT record
  7. Host record should be as provided
  8. The DKIM TXT record should value  be as provided
  9. Sometimes you need to add quotation marks before and after your TXT record depending on your host.
  10. Go back to Google Admin and click start authentication and wait up to 48 hours for it to propagate

Adding your DMARC record

Lastly we are going to add a DMARC record. Be sure you have done the first two records before adding this otherwise it won’t work.

  1. Login to your hosting and go to your DNS settings
  2. Add a new TXT record
  3. Host record should be: _dmarc
  4. The DMARC TXT record value should be: v=DMARC1; p=reject; rua=mailto:[email protected]
  5. Replace the “[email protected]” with an actual business email you use such as postmaster@ or info@
  6. Sometimes you need to add quotation marks before and after your TXT record depending on your host.

Once all these three protocols have been set up it may take a few hours for these changes to be reflected in further test emails. I recommend you do another test though on mail-tester.com to see if the changes you made are busy being done and that there is nothing else you need to do. You should be trying to get a score of 10/10 or at the very least 9/10 to ensure the best possible send status.

Spam filtering

Another avenue you might want to explore is to add internet security to your device to have your emails scanned for viruses and spam to help you identify problematic emails. We recommend a couple different platforms that you can find here in our Recommend Platforms and Software.

Conclusion

So that is that! A quick(ish) way to help stop your Gsuite emails going to spam. A quick way to try and boost your send status and avoid your emails going to spam. Sometimes this might not be enough and you might need to start looking at dedicated IP addresses and other third party tools but this is a free and easy way to get going that should solve 90% of the problems. Remember you are not alone in this and there are countless others having the same issues which is why you get enterprises asking you to check your spam folder at times.

For now, just do the above fixes and you should see some instant results!