Your authentication passes and you are still in spam.
SPF, DKIM and DMARC are green. The ESP says delivered. A customer mentions in passing that your emails go to junk, and you realise you have no idea how long that has been true.
"Why are my emails going to spam? Especially gmail?" I have lost count of how many times I have seen that question. Right behind it is the same question from someone whose setup is textbook correct.
The single most expensive misunderstanding in small-store email is the word "delivered" in your reporting.
Delivered means the receiving server accepted the message. It says nothing about which folder it landed in. A 99% delivery rate sitting next to a 4% open rate is not a contradiction, it is the spam folder showing up in the only way it ever does.
Which is why the discovery is nearly always accidental, and nearly always months late.
“SPF, DKIM and DMARC all pass. So why am I in spam?”
Authentication is the part everyone checks because it is the part with a green tick. It is rarely the problem by the time somebody asks.
You are sending to people who forgot you
Complaints come from subscribers who no longer remember opting in. Gmail and Yahoo act on a 0.30% complaint rate, and that threshold is invisible until you have already crossed it.
Engagement is the signal, not your DNS
Mailbox providers watch whether people open, reply, and move you out of junk. A list where 2,600 of 15,000 ever open teaches Gmail exactly what to do with the next send.
Transactional mail shares the same domain
When password resets and order confirmations go out on the marketing domain, a marketing reputation problem becomes a customers-cannot-log-in problem.
How It Gets Repaired
Slowly, and in this order. Anything faster makes it worse.
Stop sending to the dead
Sending narrows to people who have actually engaged recently. The list size on your dashboard drops and it will feel like going backwards. It is the only thing that works.
Rebuild the signal
Weeks of sending to the engaged segment only, at a lower volume, so the providers relearn that people want this mail. There is no way to buy speed here.
Widen again, carefully
Re-engagement goes out in controlled batches to the people who went quiet, with a genuine last-chance, and anyone who ignores it gets suppressed rather than carried forever.
What Nobody Can Do About Deliverability
This is the area where the industry lies most, so this section matters more here than on any other page.
Reputation recovers in weeks, not days
If it took six months of sending to a dead list to get here, it is not coming back next Tuesday. Anyone selling you a one-week deliverability fix will send more mail to prove it is working. More mail is the cause.
Nobody controls the Promotions tab
Primary placement cannot be guaranteed by a setting, a header, or an agency relationship. Anyone claiming they can reliably move you out of Promotions is describing something they cannot do.
Frequently Asked Questions
My SPF, DKIM and DMARC all pass. Why am I still in spam?
How long does deliverability take to recover?
Will I have to delete part of my list?
Find Out Where You Are Actually Landing
The audit checks placement, complaint rate, list health and whether your transactional mail is exposed. On video, and yours to keep.
Book the Audit CallIf the fix is something you can do yourself in an afternoon, the video will say so.