If you are sending a confirmation email to new subscribers, it's important they receive this email successfully.
Unfortunately, this isn't always the case. Here are the most common reasons the confirmation email might land in the spam folder:
1. You're testing your opt-in with an email address that has the same domain as your sending address.
It's common to test your opt-in by adding your own email address to it. However, if your sending address is the same as the one you just entered into the opt-in, or if they share the same domain, it's common for the confirmation email to go to the spam folder.
This happens when your email server sees that it's receiving an email from itself, but it knows that it didn't send the message. Imagine opening your mailbox at home to see an envelope from yourself, but sent from an unknown address. You would probably be suspicious!
That's exactly what happens when your email server sees an email come in from your email address, but from Kit's IP address.
The good thing is that your emails won't go to your subscribers' spam folders for this reason. The spam filtering happens only because the sending domain matches the receiving domain during your test. We recommend testing with a different email address when wanting to see how your confirmation emails will perform with real subscribers.
2. You're sending from a freemail domain like gmail.com and icloud.com.
If you send from a freemail address, your emails will likely land in the spam folder. For better results, send from your own domain that matches your brand.
Learn more about why you need your own domain to send email in our other guide.
3. Your sending domain is using DMARC for authentication.
This is an advanced topic, so if you don't know what DMARC is and are sure you haven't added a DMARC record to your domain, feel free to skip to the next point.
If you're familiar with DMARC and think you might be using it to secure your domain, be sure you've verified your sending domain within Kit. Doing this will allow your Kit emails to pass DMARC authentication.
For more information, check out our article on using a verified domain for email sending.
4. Your sender reputation is damaged.
Once all the technical matters discussed above are taken care of, the biggest thing determining whether your email lands in the inbox or spam is your sender reputation (also known as domain reputation).
Check out our other article to learn more about sender reputation and how to improve it.