Your event emails are going to spam, and you cannot see it

The metric you are watching hides the problem

Your platform reports a 99% delivery rate. That means the receiving server accepted the message. It says nothing about whether it landed in an inbox or a spam folder, and the sending side genuinely cannot tell the difference.

A joining instruction that went to spam is a no-show you will attribute to apathy.

The three records

SPF lists which servers may send as your domain. One TXT record. A common failure is having several — multiple SPF records is an error state, and it is what happens when marketing, the events platform and IT each add their own without talking.

DKIM signs each message so the recipient can verify it was not altered. Your sending platform provides the keys.

DMARC tells receivers what to do when SPF or DKIM fails, and — this is the useful part — where to send reports. Start at p=none with a reporting address and read the reports for a fortnight. You will discover systems sending as your domain that you did not know about.

Then move to p=quarantine, then p=reject. Moving straight to reject before reading the reports is how you stop your own invoices from being delivered.

The habit that matters more than the records

Do not send event mail from a subdomain that also sends anything else.

Use a dedicated subdomain for event mail. Its reputation is then yours to manage, and a badly-targeted campaign cannot damage the deliverability of your invoices or your password resets.

Warm it before the big send. A new subdomain that suddenly emits 8,000 messages looks exactly like a compromised account, because that is what a compromised account does.

What gets you filtered

• //Sending to addresses that bounce. Every hard bounce damages reputation. Remove them immediately rather than retrying.
• //A list that has not been mailed in a year. Addresses decay. Re-engage in small batches.
• //Image-only emails. A message that is one large image with almost no text is a classic spam signature.
• //URL shorteners. They obscure the destination, which is the whole reason filters distrust them.
• //No unsubscribe link. Recipients who cannot unsubscribe mark as spam instead, which is far worse for you.

Test before the send that matters

Send the joining instructions to a set of seed addresses across the major providers your delegates actually use, and look at where they land. Not whether they arrived — where.

Do this for the day-before reminder in particular, because that is the one message where a spam folder directly becomes an empty seat.

The one to get right above all others

If you fix nothing else, make sure the transactional messages land: registration confirmation, calendar invitation, joining instructions, day-before reminder.

Marketing mail going to spam costs you reach. A joining instruction going to spam costs you a delegate who had already decided to come.