Why your website's emails land in spam, and how to fix it.

Most small business owners only find out their website emails are broken by accident. A customer rings to ask where their order confirmation went. A supplier says they never got the notification. Or you spot a three-week-old enquiry sitting in your spam folder, long after the person has gone elsewhere.

It is one of the least glamorous parts of running a website, and one of the most expensive to ignore. Here is what usually goes wrong and how to put it right.

Why this matters more for online shops now

More of the buying happens online every year. ONS figures show internet sales made up 27.4% of all retail sales in 2025, up from 19.2% in 2019.

When the order, the payment and the follow-up all happen without a phone call, email does the job a shop assistant used to do. It confirms the order, reassures the customer and tells you something needs doing. If those emails go missing, the customer feels ignored and you lose track of the work.

The usual reasons website emails go missing

1. The email is not proven to come from you

Big inboxes like Gmail and Outlook check whether a sender is allowed to send on behalf of a domain. That is done with three DNS records: SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Google and Yahoo tightened their rules for senders in 2024, and mail without proper authentication is now far more likely to be filtered or rejected.

Plenty of small business sites still send mail with none of these set up.

2. The contact form pretends to be the customer

A common mistake is a contact form that sends the enquiry "from" the visitor's own email address. To Gmail, that looks like your server forging someone else's identity, which is exactly what spammers do. The fix is simple: send from your own domain and put the customer's address in the reply-to field.

3. Mail is sent straight from cheap shared hosting

Many off-the-shelf sites send email from the same server that hosts the website. On shared hosting, you share that server's reputation with everyone else on it. One bad neighbour can drag your messages into spam.

4. Nobody is checking

Emails rarely break with a bang. A plugin update, a changed DNS record or a new mailbox provider can stop them quietly, and nobody notices for weeks.

If your website relies on email to tell you about a sale, a failed email is a lost sale you never hear about.

What to fix first

1. Use a proper sending service. Services built for transactional email, such as Postmark, Amazon SES or Resend, are designed for order confirmations and alerts. They have good reputations and give you logs showing what was sent and delivered.
2. Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC for your domain. Your developer or domain provider can do this in an afternoon.
3. Send from your own domain, with the customer in reply-to, never in the from field.
4. Save every enquiry and order in your admin, not just in an email. Email should be a notification, not the only record.
5. Test it monthly. Place a test order and fill in your own contact form. Check it arrives in the inbox, not spam.

What we do on our own projects

We treat email as something that will fail sooner or later, and build so nothing is lost when it does.

For Merch Hive, the merchandise and print studio at Norwich Airport, quote requests can be sent from any page of the site. Each one is saved in Joel's own admin even if the email fails. A missed notification is an annoyance, not a lost client.

For Surplush, the Norwich buyers club selling packaging and cleaning supplies, we moved the background work after a card checkout into an AWS Lambda. That means taking a payment is not held up by generating invoices and sending emails. The customer's checkout finishes quickly, and the slower jobs carry on separately.

Email should tell you something happened. It should never be the only place it is recorded.

A quick health check for your site

• Do order confirmations arrive within a minute or two?
• Do they land in the inbox, not promotions or spam?
• If your email provider went down today, would you still see new orders and enquiries in your admin?
• Does anyone get told if emails start bouncing?

If you answered no or "not sure" to any of these, it is worth an hour of someone's time. For Norwich and Norfolk businesses selling online, it is usually one of the cheapest fixes going, with some of the clearest payback.

If you would like us to check how your site sends email, or you are planning an online shop and want this done properly from day one, get in touch with Kyurkchiev Group. We are based in Norwich and happy to take a look.