There are tons of things that can make your email go into a spam box especially with the large email providers like Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, etc… Certain titles and text raise red flags and get your emails sent straight to the bulk mail folder.  I’m not going to tell you how to write correct emails (at least not at this point) to avoid the spam box, but I will let you know about a few things you can do on your server to make it less likely you will appear in the spam box.  You need a dedicated server, VPS or a host that will help you with this to do this.  If done properly most of your email will make it into the main inbox without a hitch for the big email providers and get through spam filters.

Note:  I’m using CPanel so this is a CPanel tutorial.  The steps may be similar with other control panels but might not be exactly the same.

First thing you need to do is setup reverse DNS or rdns.  A lot of hosting providers will take care of this for you.  If they won’t, here is a very good tutorial on how to do this (you need to login or create an account there to view the tutorial).

This is a very important first step and you should get this done before worrying about anything else.  Even if you can’t do the other steps for whatever reason just this will improve your deliverability.

Second step setup SPF and DomainKeys.  An easy way is just to log into each CPanel account and in the Mail section go to Email Authentication.  Click Enable for SPF and DomainKeys.

I was stuck on the second step for a while because I was using the old CPanel X theme.  I ended up having to go into WHM and using the X Skin Migration Wizard to switch to the X3 theme for this option to show up.  It took 2 seconds to do this.

Another way of doing it is by running these commands in SSH:

For SPF:

/usr/local/cpanel/bin/spf_installer username

For DomainKeys

/usr/local/cpanel/bin/domain_keys_installer username

Where it says username put in your CPanel username.

That’s it.  These quick steps can drastically increase your email deliverability rate.  Yahoo is still a pain, but after your domain has been around a while (if you’re using a new domain) they’ll start letting your emails in.