Why Is My Email Going to Spam? A DNS-First Checklist
Before blaming your email content, subject line, or sender reputation for spam placement, check your DNS. A huge share of deliverability problems trace back to a handful of misconfigured records — and most take minutes to check and fix.
The checklist
1. Do you have SPF, and is it valid?
Query your TXT records and confirm exactly one SPF record exists (v=spf1 ...). Two SPF records is itself an error that causes a permerror. Confirm it’s under the 10-DNS-lookup limit and ends in -all or ~all, not a bare (unqualified) all.
2. Is DKIM actually signing your mail?
Send a real test message to a mailbox you control and inspect the headers for a DKIM-Signature line. Presence of the header isn’t enough — verify it actually passes (Gmail and most webmail clients show “signed-by” and DKIM pass/fail in the message details).
3. Do you have a DMARC record at all?
No DMARC record means no visibility into who’s sending as your domain, and mailbox providers increasingly treat its absence as a negative signal on its own. Even a p=none monitoring record is better than nothing.
4. Do SPF/DKIM actually align with your From: domain?
This is the step people miss most. SPF and DKIM can both technically “pass” while still failing DMARC, because the passing domain doesn’t match the visible From: address. Check the DMARC aggregate reports (the rua address) to see real alignment results, not just pass/fail per mechanism.
5. Do you have reverse DNS (PTR) set up?
Your sending IP should resolve to a hostname via PTR, and that hostname should resolve back to the same IP (forward-confirmed reverse DNS). Missing or mismatched PTR records are a strong spam signal, especially for self-hosted mail servers.
6. Is your sending IP on a blocklist?
Shared hosting and cloud IP ranges get reused. Check your sending IP against major DNSBLs — a clean SPF/DKIM/DMARC setup won’t save you if the IP itself is flagged.
7. Are your MX records correct and reachable?
This affects inbound delivery and replies, but a broken or missing MX record on the sending domain is also a credibility signal some filters check.
8. Is your domain new or has it changed sending patterns suddenly?
Not a DNS record, but worth naming: brand-new domains and sudden volume spikes from a previously quiet domain both look like spam behavior to filters, regardless of how correct your records are. Warm up gradually.
The fast way to check all of this
Manually checking SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MX and DNS hygiene one at a time is slow and error-prone — especially the alignment logic in step 4. That’s exactly what MXCorrect automates: enter your domain and get every one of these checks back in seconds, with specific fixes instead of just pass/fail.