Note: Our documentation pages are a work in progress! If you can't find the answers you need, please email us to let us know. We'll be happy to answer your questions.

Email Deliverability

Deliverability is a term for the probability that an email ends up in its recipients' inbox, rather than a spam folder.

Why did my email sent from Purelymail get marked as spam? #

Most mail providers will consider the following factors when determining whether or not an email is spam:

• Reputation of the sending IP address. This factor is entirely us. Basically, a provider will look at where mail is sent from when determining its trustworthiness. Our IP reputation should be decent at major providers, but we're still building it and it may be lacking at more obscure ones.
• Domain reputation. If you're using a shared domain like purelymail.com, this is again on us. For a custom domain, reputation is built by sending non-spam emails over time. A new domain may have poor to no reputation.
• The message itself. If the message looks spammy, it might be marked as spam. This mostly shouldn't apply to you. Note that messages that are replies or that have large attachments will likely look less spammy, which could offset a poor domain reputation.

How can I improve my custom domain's deliverability? #

• Make sure you set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records! These directly improve deliverability. (See the Domains page in the Account portal for the specific records.)
• Note that domains with exotic TLDs are often used by spammers and may require more reputation building.
• Try sending emails from your domain to an account at the mail providers you're interested in, and making sure those are read, marked as "not spam", and if possible replied to.

I tried to send an email, but got a message that it was rejected! #

Please forward any such reject messages to contact@purelymail.com and we can take a look. This is likely the result of a block-happy mail provider rejecting the message at delivery time, and probably just requires some manual unblocking steps.

What mail providers am I likely to run into issues with? #

• We've had issues with Microsoft Outlook in the past, though they seem improved recently.