Definition
💡 An email that's flagged as spam means that your mail service provider's spam filters have determined the message to be malicious and decided to mark it accordingly.
Example
For instance, suppose you receive an email from an unknown sender with an attachment. Your mail server scans the attachments and finds out that it contains known malware. To protect you from this threat, the entire message is flagged as spam.
Why is my email flagged as spam?
A mail can be flagged as spam for several reasons, including:
- It contains a malicious attachment.
- The text in the subject or body is suspicious.
- Other users have manually flagged the same message as spam before.
- SPF, DKIM, and DMARC have not been properly set up for the sender's domain or have not passed.
- The message contains links to suspicious or blacklisted websites.
In practice, the reason why exactly a message was flagged as spam is sometimes not clear, but it's also not as important (at least to the recipient) as the fact that the spam filter successfully intercepted and isolated it.
Where does a flagged email go?
In most cases, an email flagged as spam is automatically moved to a special folder dedicated to spam messages:
- In Gmail and Yahoo Mail, this folder is called Spam.
- In Outlook, messages that are flagged as spam go to the Junk Email folder.
💡 It's a good idea to check the Spam/Junk Email folder from time to time because legitimate messages can be mistakenly marked as spam. On the other hand, any spam messages that are not automatically flagged as such should be manually marked as spam by the user because this helps the spam filter learn and improve over time.
How to check if my email is flagged as spam?
Unfortunately, there's no completely reliable way to check if your messages are getting flagged as spam. The best you can do is to use a free mail spam checker like Mailgenius to analyze your address against common spam filters.
You simply need to send a message to a provided address and wait for a report to arrive. Free mail spam checkers are particularly useful if you rely on a lesser-known or self-managed mail service. With more popular mail services like Gmail, Outlook, or Yahoo, your messages should never be flagged as spam unless their text or attachments contain suspicious content.
What to do if your email is flagged as spam?
If your messages are consistently flagged as spam, then you can try the following:
- Avoid spammy-looking subject lines and body text.
- Double-check your attachments for malware using VirusTotal or any other reputable malware scanner.
- Include attachments individually instead of as a single archive.
- Don't include any hyperlinks or include them only as plaintext.
- Ask your recipients to add your email address to their contacts or whitelist.
Should these solutions fail to stop your messages from getting flagged as spam, then you can always create a new mail address. We recommend you register it with a trusted email provider like Gmail, Outlook, or Yahoo.
