My emails end up in spam – How can I improve email deliverability?

Imagine signing up for professional business coaching and getting notifications from co********@gm***.com , what does that tell you about the business/brand? Would be excited to work with a “Lazy coach”?

Let’s assume your domain name is bestonlineservice.com
And your email address:  Jo**@be***************.com
Is hosted on the same shared hosting plan where your bestonlineservice.com website is.

Why do your sent emails end up in spam?
To answer this question, you need to know that the email protocol that is responsible for sending messages, is called SMTP an acronym for “simple mail transfer protocol”
And much like everything else on the internet SMTP works by using IP addresses not names.
So any message that you send from your email: Jo**@be***************.com
Will end up using SMTP in order to reach its destination.

Since SMTP is using the IP address the message would be originating from that IP address “where your website is” Up to here and there’s no real issue.

You know that you’re not spamming anyone or sending thousands of messages per day/week, so where is the problem?

If you’re on shared hosting (like the majority of website hosting plans) your IP address is the server’s IP address which is shared with everyone else who’s physically hosted on that server,
This can range from 50 to 250 clients (sometimes even more) and those clients “your server neighbors” aren’t necessarily treating email the same way you are, all it takes is for someone to send one spammy message, or a slightly large number of messages (that may or may not be spam) for an online Spam filtering service (like Spamhaus) to pick that IP address up and block it/add it to the spam list (your IP)!
At this point, many of your messages would end up showing in the “spam” mail folders of your clients!

In most cases your hosting provider can – and will – take steps to remove their IP addresses from the spam filtering services block list however this takes a few days, sometimes even weeks depending on how many spam hits were originating from those IP addresses, this, in turn, makes your email system that is on that hosting plan, utterly unreliable and damaging to your business reputation, even though you have done nothing wrong!

So what is the solution?
the best thing to do is to host your email separately from your website, host it with a specialized email hosting platform/company, not only that you will have a better and more reliable email system but it will also enable you to change website hosting whenever a new technology or a better offer comes along because it’s so much easier to move a website & migrate it to a new hosting service if there are no old email messages moving with it.

There are specific email service providers who have been doing this for years and have a great infrastructure as well as email deliverability rates
Such as Google suite (recently rebranded as Google workplace) Microsoft 365 for businesses and a few other (less known) good providers.

In my next post, I’m going to give you a good idea about those email service providers and I will also shed more light on how to migrate your email to one of these service providers and how long an email migration could take, luckily you only need to do it once!

Wishing you success
yours truly
Amr The Internet Guy!