Recently I was on the phone discussing the contents of an email I sent previously. I noticed the recipient said my email ended up in the spam box. I thought nothing of it and proceeded with the conversation.
After noticing this same scenario happening a few more times with a few other people, I decided to check for issues with my email deliverability. I navigated to the Mail Tester website (https://www.mail-tester.com/) and started the email check process – send an email to the address you are provided with when you first land on the Mail Tester website. After a few minutes of sending an email, I returned to the Mail Tester website to see what the sending score was.
Below you can see what the result was.
There are quite a few metrics that are analyzed to determine what I will call the ‘sendworthiness’ of an email. Looking at the image, notice the section that says “What we retained as your current SPF record is:”. Mail Tester is detecting what the current setting is (which was a large part of the problem in this case) and Mail Tester tells you what is should be changed to in the section “It should be changed to:”. I made the change as suggested (and that involves editing the SPF record on your domain) and sent another test email to Mail Tester. Now here is where things started to look strange. I have done this mail deliverability check before so I expected to receive a really good score after editing my SPF record. This time when I checked my score after editing my SPF record, I did not get a good score, I actually received the same score I received before but this time there was a new ip address discovered by Mail Tester and was being recommended for me to add to my SPF record again. Typically, it takes one edit to the SPF record to drastically improve the score you receive from Mail Tester but this time, it took me 5 edits to finally receive a good score (9 out of 10) from Mail Tester. After one week, I started getting a similar complaint (email going to the spam box) again. So I repeated the process of testing my email deliverability and surprise, surprise, my SPF record needed another edit to add a newly discovered ip address that Mail Tester found.
Why did it take mail 5 attempts for Mail Tester to finally give me a good score when typically it takes just one? Why was it that the sending ip address (newly discovered ip address by Mail Tester) of my webhost changed after one week? That is not typical, I do not see this happening with my other web host so this tells me the environment of this web host changes occasionally and affects my email deliverability. I was not about to repeat my 5-times-edit-SPF-record ordeal with Mail Tester this time. Maybe it is time to order a new vps (from my favorite vps provider) or modify an existing server to accommodate a new domain in my hosting control panel (I like and use Virtualmin at the moment but I will admit CentOS Web Panel is looking like an attractive alternative). I may reconsider editing this post to include the name of the web host I am referring to or I may not.