“But I’m not a spammer!”
If your emails aren't reaching their intended recipients, you're going to have a very hard life.
I've had conversations today with three separate coaching clients whose outbound emails are being either bounced, routed to the junk folder, or just silently sent into a black hole of invisibility.
They're not spammers. But somebody thinks they're acting like spammers, and that's all it takes.
To avoid looking like a spammer:
Ensure you're using a reputable SMTP service (e.g. SendGrid, Mailgun, Sparkost) to handle your outbound email.
Your SMTP provider will give you some steps to configure your domain name for valid sending. Follow those steps.
If someone is marked as unsubscribed, don't assume it was a mistake. This is a hard thing to accept, but losing one subscriber is better than having all your emails go undelivered.
Don't send a single email message to dozens of recipients. CiviCRM will usually let you send one email with up to 50 CC or BCC recipients, but that's usually a bad idea. It's the kind of thing that spammers do. (Instead, used CiviCRM’s mass emailing features. That's the right way to send a mailing even to thousands of recipients.)
Here's the thing:
You know you're not a spammer. I know you’re not a spammer.
But the computer systems on the recipient end don't know it.
They’re processing billions of email messages a day, and they’re highly motivated to keep spammers off their networks. They won’t make time to hear you explain your good intentions.
If they think you're acting like a spammer, they'll treat you like one.
And the result of that is: your people, who genuinely want to hear from you, will not.
All the best,
A.