Why your quotes keep landing in the customer’s spam folder

You spent forty minutes on the quote. You sent it on Tuesday. By Friday you have decided they went with somebody else, and you have quietly written the job off.

They never saw it.

This happens far more than anyone realises, because the failure is silent in both directions. Nothing bounces. Nothing warns you. Your customer does not know an email is missing, so they do not chase it, and you do not know it never arrived, so you do not resend. The job just evaporates.

Why email providers are so suspicious now

Somewhere between eight and nine out of every ten emails sent in the world are junk. Gmail, Outlook and the rest are therefore not gently sorting your message. They are assuming the worst and looking for reasons to believe otherwise.

Since 2024 the big providers have also tightened the rules considerably, particularly around proving that a message genuinely came from where it claims. That was aimed at bulk senders, but the general climate it created affects everybody, including a one-person business sending four emails a day.

The good news is that the things that get you through are dull and mostly one-off.

The first fix: stop sending from a free address

If your business email ends in gmail.com, btinternet.com, hotmail.co.uk or anything of that family, you are fighting with one hand tied.

Two reasons, one technical and one not.

The technical one is that you cannot prove anything about a free address. All the verification below works by attaching your business’s own domain name to your messages. Without your own domain, there is nothing to verify.

The unglamorous one is that it looks less serious. A £4,000 quote from a Hotmail address makes a stranger hesitate, and you will never hear about the hesitation.

If you own a domain for your website, you already own the right to send email from it. That part is usually cheap or included.

Mailbox or forwarder? They are not the same thing

Worth knowing because the cheap option has a catch.

A forwarder is a redirection. Mail sent to the hello@ address on your own domain arrives and is bounced onward to your personal address. It costs little or nothing. The catch is that you can only receive. When you reply, it goes out from your personal address, so the customer sees your Gmail anyway, and none of the verification below applies to your outgoing mail.

A mailbox is a real account on your own domain. You receive and send as that address rather than your personal one, and your outgoing mail can be properly signed.

Forwarders are fine for an address you only ever receive on, like info@ pointing at a shared inbox. If you send quotes, invoices or anything that matters, you want a mailbox. Ours start at a couple of pounds a month and the free forwarder is still there for the addresses that only need to catch things.

The three settings that do the heavy lifting

Here is where most articles start using letters at you. The three do exist and they matter, but you do not need to understand them in detail. You need to know they exist and that somebody has set them up.

They are entries in your domain’s settings, they are set once, and they then work quietly forever. Without them, a receiving server has no way to distinguish your genuine quote from somebody pretending to be you, and increasingly it will treat both the same way.

If you have no idea whether yours are set up, that is the single most useful thing to go and ask whoever looks after your domain. It is a five-minute answer.

The one that catches everyone: your own contact form

This is worth a section of its own because it is the most common self-inflicted version of the problem.

A contact form on your website sends you an email when somebody fills it in. Very often that email is set up to appear to come from the visitor’s own address, so that you can hit reply. Sensible in spirit. Disastrous in practice, because your website is now sending mail claiming to be from an address it has no permission to use, which is precisely the pattern all of the above is designed to stop.

The result is enquiry notifications landing in your junk folder, or not arriving at all, and you concluding the website is not generating enquiries.

Done properly, the notification comes from your own domain and carries the visitor’s address as the reply-to. Same convenience, none of the failure.

Two things worth doing today, whoever built your site: send yourself a test enquiry and check the junk folder, and if enquiries have felt thin for a while, treat this as a suspect before you blame the website. There is more on that diagnosis in our piece on websites that quietly stop working.

The everyday habits that help

Once the plumbing is right, the rest is just not behaving like a spammer.

• Write like a person. All-capital subject lines, rows of exclamation marks and the word FREE in the subject are all treated exactly as you would expect.
• Do not send a quote as a bare attachment with no message. An empty email carrying a PDF is a classic malware pattern.
• Avoid shortened links in normal business mail.
• If you send a newsletter, use a proper mailing service rather than blind-copying two hundred people from your own mailbox. That one habit can get your whole domain marked as a nuisance.
• Keep your list clean. Repeatedly sending to addresses that no longer exist damages your reputation as a sender.

When somebody says they did not get it

Do not resend the same email three times; that makes things worse. Instead:

• Ring them and ask them to check their junk folder, and to mark it as not junk if it is there. That single action from the recipient teaches their provider something for next time.
• Ask them to add your address to their contacts.
• If it is a big organisation with a strict mail filter, such as a council, a school or an NHS trust, ask whether they can whitelist your domain. This is a routine request and they will have a process.

The Shropshire footnote

Small counties run on referral and repeat work, so a great deal of local business is done by email between people who already know each other. That is exactly the traffic you cannot afford to lose silently. It is also why plenty of long-established local businesses are still sending from an address they set up with their broadband in 2006, which their own customers may trust but which every filter in the world is increasingly sceptical about.

If you want a hand

Business mailboxes on your own domain are part of what we set up with a website, and the three settings above get configured properly as part of the job rather than being left as homework. Our price list has the mailbox options on it, including the free forwarder.

If you are not a customer and you just want to know whether yours are right, ask your current provider the question in plain words: "are SPF, DKIM and DMARC set up on my domain?" A good provider will answer in one line.