Why are my emails going to spam?

Landing in spam is almost never one broken setting. It's a reputation score mailbox providers build from how people react to your mail, and it moves slowly in both directions. Here's what to check, roughly in the order worth checking it.

You don't need to touch DNS

Worth clearing up first, because most advice on the internet starts here. Thunk Mail sends from its own authenticated domain and handles SPF and DKIM for you. There are no DNS records for you to add, and adding some won't help. If you arrived from a guide telling you to set that up, it doesn't apply here.

Check your complaint and bounce rates

Open a recent campaign and look at the numbers.

• Complaints above roughly 0.1% are the single most damaging signal there is. One complaint in a thousand is the line where Gmail starts treating you differently.
• High bounce rates say your list is stale or was never opt-in. Mailbox providers read that as a sender who doesn't clean up.

If either is elevated, stop sending broadly and fix the list before your next campaign. Sending more while the numbers are bad digs the hole deeper.

Ask where the list came from

This is the uncomfortable one, and it's the most common cause. Purchased lists, scraped addresses, and contacts who signed up for something unrelated years ago all produce the same result: low engagement, high complaints, spam placement. No amount of content tuning fixes a list that never opted in.

Look at engagement, not just volume

Mailbox providers weigh whether people open, reply, and click against whether they delete unread. A smaller list of people who want your email outperforms a large indifferent one, and it isn't close. Cut contacts who haven't opened anything in six months or more and watch what happens to your placement.

Then look at the email itself

Content matters less than reputation, but it still matters:

• Subject lines that shout. ALL CAPS, rows of exclamation marks, and "FREE" style hooks are the oldest signals in the book.
• An email that's one giant image with almost no text.
• Link text that says one thing while the link goes somewhere else.
• Sudden volume spikes from a sender with no history. Ramp up over several sends instead.

If it's still happening

Send a test to yourself at Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo and see whether the placement differs by provider. One provider filtering while others deliver usually points at that provider's specific reputation view of you, and it recovers with a stretch of clean, engaged sending. All of them filtering points back at the list.

Still stuck? Get in touch with a campaign name and we'll look at what your recent sends actually did.

Related: Deliverability 101 is the preventive version of this page. How bounces, unsubscribes, and complaints work explains the numbers referenced above.