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@veljkoristic ・ Jan 17,2024 ・ 6 min read ・ 324 views ・ Originally posted on mailtrap.io
At the end of the day, Outlook spam filter not working is a real problem largely tied to client malfunction. Even so, as a sender, you need to hawk over your email functionality and ensure low percentage of spam messages. Just follow the tips in this article and your recipients will never receive unwanted emails from you.
I’ve seen my fair share of perplexing cases, but the Outlook spam filter not working in early 2023 is certainly in the top five.
In this article, I’ll cover the details to help bulk senders understand what to do. And there are also useful tips for everyday Outlook users.
Here, I wanna give you an experience-based post-mortem to make it easier for you to recognize and troubleshoot the issue.
All hell breaks loose and if you’re responsible for email campaigns, a patch of grey hair pops up on your head. Jokes aside, 3 things typically happen.
Tip: Check the full guide on how to prevent your emails going to spam.
It’s easy to blame Microsoft. However, it may also happen that users or senders misconfigured email settings, making things even worse.
Tweaking the filter settings or unknowingly marking important emails as junk can disrupt the filter’s efficacy.
Outlook learns from user behavior, and in February 2023 it was a bad student. It could have happened if you, or your recipients, frequently moved emails to and from the junk folder. I can only assume that the Outlook junk filter got confused and junked perfectly deliverable emails, then let the obvious junk creep into the primary inbox.
If an email comes from a sender with a tarnished domain or IP address reputation or poor email practices, Outlook may flag it as spam, regardless of its actual content. The same thing could happen if you haven’t properly authenticated your sending server. Remember that this applies to any other client (Gmail, Hotmail, etc.). It’s the first thing I checked, and I’ll tell you how to do it yourself in the following sections.
Honestly, none of us can fix Outlook and ‘make’ the spam filter work properly, that’s in Microsoft’s hands.
But with a few adjustments and a bit of know-how, you can work on your infrastructure and get the spam filtration back on track.
When you suddenly see a surge in spam complaints, do the following two things right away. (I’ll also trow in a bonus tip for good measure.)
If you send emails in bulk, make sure to use proper domain authentication methods – DNS records (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC). These help Outlook recognize the sender as legitimate and generally help increase the level of protection against phishing and malware from your domain.
How can you check authentication records?
MXToolbox is a free lightweight tool to do it. Select their DNS lookup tool, paste your domain name to the designated field, and it’ll check whether your domain has the records published.
Feel free to click the Find Problems button, and the tool will list all the related warnings and error logs for you. MXToolbox also has a separate lookup tool for each DNS record (SPF, DMARC, DKIM).
I have to stress that the tool above is good for quick troubleshooting. However, you’ll still need to know how to fix things if there are problems with the DNS records, or critical records are missing.
So it’s better to opt for an email-sending service that requires you to add all the DNS and authenticate your domain before sending. Effectively, it helps prevent most authentication and DNS-related deliverability issues.
Mailrap Email Sending takes care of you by requiring DNS authentication.
We made sure that the DNS authentication is as easy for you as possible. It’s only a copy-paste job, you can copy all the records and share them with your admin. And yes, we already parse your SPF, so there’s no additional work there.
Plus, you have to take this step for the following reasons.
Outlook considers the sender’s score when filtering emails. If a sender is consistently marked as spam by many users, their emails are more likely to end up in the junk folder. In turn, the sender’s score goes down.
How can you check the score?
There are more than a few tools, I’ll list two that I find the easiest to use, plus one from Microsoft.
1.Sender Score from Validity – Arguably the quickest, and among the most accurate. Add your domain, register, and run the check. In under a minute, you get a detailed score (top score is 100) across all hostnames and IPs on your domain.
2. BarracudaCentral.org – Also super quick and convenient to use, it’s a simple tool to check if you appear in any blacklists and how your domain is categorized. Though, if all’s well, Baracuda gives you little info. But you get a detailed report should your domain be in trouble.
3. Microsoft SNDS – Honestly, I haven’t used this one. But based on a quick search, it’s much more comprehensive and offers the data points for the following:
Note: Check full tutorials on sender and email domain reputation.
To continuously keep your domain reputation intact, it’s necessary to test your emails in a sandbox.
Let me explain.
Mailtrap Email Testing helps you inspect and debug emails in staging, dev, and QA environments before sending them to recipients in production.
You can preview and analyze content for spam (via SpamAssassin) and validate HTML/CSS. Plus, you can see the market support for your email across different devices (be it Windows, Mac, iPhone, or Android) and mailbox providers (including Outlook).
Mailtrap allows you to have an accurate estimation of your email deliverability without actually sending an email. You can select just one client (e.g. Outlook app) and see if the template is likely to trigger a junk mail filter.
Also, you get detailed spam analysis, error logs, and quick explanations on how to fix them. Hit the button below to test it out yourself.
Now, I’m moving to inbox placement as an umbrella parameter that encompasses much of what’s already been discussed.
To delve deeper into outlook spam filter settings and gain valuable insights, be sure to visit the original article on the Mailtrap blog.
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