I knew it was a risk, but I did it anyway… And now my entire domain has been tagged as SPAM. GAH! It's such a pain, and a situation that could have been so easily avoided if I had made different choices. But as the characters in my stories often say to one another: I've made my bed—now I have to lie in it.

But this is one of those mistakes that others can easily learn from. Let's get down to the nitty-gritty and avoid the SPAM folder.

A quick request to "white list" my domain

Before I go much further, I would love it if my faithful followers would go into their email systems and actually "white list" my domain. You might need to "white list" individual email addresses too, but the "white list" tells your spam filters that you want to get emails from that domain (or email address). This is important if you would like to actually get those emails from me.

But let us move on to the SPAM disaster story. (I say that as I'm sitting here laughing at my own stupidity.)

The SPAM Disaster

In March 2022, I started a business course with the intention of understanding what I needed to do to help improve my business. As part of the course, we had to run a "marketing and operations" project. The marketing aspect of my project was connected to understanding what it was that writers wanted to learn more about and where they got their information about writing craft. The only way to get that information was to run surveys.

(And for those of you who answered those surveys… THANK YOU SO MUCH! It was valuable information that my readers and faithful followers will be able to benefit from in the future. But back to the tale.)

As part of the survey sequence, I wanted to sent an email to participants to let them know that they were in the draw for the prize (Amazon gift cards) and invite them to go into a second draw for a bigger prize by answering a second survey. What I did was legal. It was individual emails sent to the email addresses of those who answered the survey and gave consent for that communication. If it had been only a few emails, it wouldn't have been a problem. It was the number of emails involved that made the whole thing go insane.

Within the first 24 hours of the survey, I got 140 responses. I mean, "Yeah, me!" I had a statistically viable survey on the first day. BUT that also meant 140 emails went out the door.

And that was the problem.

It was perfectly legal… just A LOT of email.

What I should have done…

What I should have done was run EVERYTHING through my email distribution system. I should have added a special group to my email list that was connected to the surveys only, adding in an automated email that gets sent to anyone who was added to that special group. As long as no one was added to my mail list without their consent, all would have been okay.

I don't know why I didn't to that in the first place.

Correction: I do know why. I was trying to be smart. I wanted to send the individual emails so I could manage it quickly, manually, and find out if any emails were bouncing right away. But sometimes, I'm too smart for my own good.

I also shouldn't have done multiple surveys in sequence. I should have run only the one survey.

But hindsight is an amazing thing. Too bad it doesn't fix the current situation that I'm in.

The Lingering SPAM Hell

So… My domain as a whole got tagged as spam. Not just the one email, but all emails hosted on that one domain. For some people, this wouldn't be a huge deal, but for me…

Clients were no longer receiving their invoices, their edited materials, and my quotes to prospective clients were being swallowed by the ether. It was frustrating, but it was also not 100%. Some clients were getting things without any issue. Others… Yeah, it was the others that had me concerned.

This was my business that we're talking about—my primary source of income. And one STUPID decision on my behalf impacted it in ways that I still don't understand.

But there are lessons to learn from this, including a few tricks to help improve your "spam health" for your domains.

How to fix SPAM issues with your domain

When I got an email from a prospective client stating that they had been waiting for a response from me and found it in their spam folder, I knew I needed to do something about my spam tagging issue, limited as it might be. I did a bit of research and found an incredibly useful online service.

mail-tester.com is a free online service that will test the "spammyness" of your emails (their term, not mine). So, when you first load the site, it gives you a randomly generated email address to send your email to that you want tested. It then runs a report on your email and comes back with a list of things that you can do to help improve your "spam health". Some fixes are super easy. Others require some technical know-how (or a phone with technical support on the other end).

Fix 1: Populate your "reply to" field in your email editor

OMG, this one is so easy to do. I have no idea how I didn't think of it before.

Go into your email editor and open the default setting for your email account. Where you specify your "Name" and signature, there should be another field called "Reply to". Even if you are putting in the same email address that is connected to your email account, put your email into that field. It might seem like a redundant thing to do, and in some ways it is, but by having something in that field, you're telling the spam filters that you're not a bot. (Because bots don't bother to populate that field.)

Each email editor is different, so I can't tell you how to access that field in your email editor. AND if you check your emails from multiple devices like I do, you'll need to do this on each device. But it's one of those "set once and forget" settings.

Fix 2: Add a signature to your emails

I didn't have an issue with this one, because I've always used a signature, but I can see how some people don't. Again, this is an easy fix, so you might as well go and do it.

Fix 3: Add a DMARC record to your DNS records for your domain

Okay, this one is technical, and if you are staring at that title with a blank stare ("What the F*** is a DNS record?"), then you will need to use the "phone technical support" approach to get this done… assuming you can even access your DNS record. But let me try to explain what this thing does.

It turns out that DMARC is something that stems back to the days when Yahoo was all the rage, well before Gmail was a thing. It told the spam filters on Yahoo that you were a person with a legitimate domain and not some bot. (It was because the DMARC record is something that has to be manually added. It's not a record present in the DNS by default.) Somewhere along the line, Google adopted the DMARC checking practice. And with more and more importance being placed on privacy and anti-spam, having that DMARC record will become vital in the future.

And that mail-tester.com site tells us plebs exactly what that record should look like.

For those who are self-hosted with a custom domain, you will have access to your DNS records through your CPanel. But for those who are using Wix or WordPress.com (or something similar) with custom domains added to your sites, it's highly unlikely that you'll have access to the DNS records.

And if you are still looking at this going "Huh?", phone technical support for your hosting provider.

Fix 4: Avoid the situation altogether

If you ever have to send out a significant number of emails to people that are similar in nature, then use an email distribution system to keep yourself safe. You can manually add people to your email list IF you do not just randomly add people to your newsletter without their consent AND you record when and how consent was given. All email distribution list providers give you that ability to add "notes" to a subscriber's details, and that is where I would put the added information about consent for manually added emails.

And for those of you worried about the financial costs… MailerLite (the service I use) has a free account for up to 1000 subscribers—perfect for those who are just starting out.

Learn from my mistakes

I happily share with the world the mistakes that I've made along my writer/editor journey because I don't want others to make the same mistakes. If you can learn from my mistakes and avoid them in the first place, why shouldn't I share that information?

This particular mistake is definitely one of those "Do as I say and not as I did" situations.

If you would like to learn more about the hidden traps associated with building an online platform, you can check out the multitude of blog posts that I have on the topic. If there is a particular topic you're interested in, just put a note in the comments and I'll do the best I can to answer your questions.