Whyyourcontactformemailsarelandinginspam(andhowtogetthemback)

Try this. Go to your own website, fill in the contact form like a customer would, and hit send. Then go and look in your inbox. If the message turns up where it should, good. If it lands in junk, or doesn't arrive at all, you've just watched a customer disappear in real time. The only difference is that a real customer wouldn't have gone rummaging in their spam folder on your behalf. They'd have assumed you couldn't be bothered to reply.

Most owners never run that test, so the first sign of trouble is quieter. Enquiries slow down, and you put it down to a flat month. Meanwhile the form works fine, the message sends fine, and it's being filed as junk before a human ever reads it.

Here's what's actually going on. When someone fills in your form, your website sends an email that claims to come from your domain, you@yourbusiness.co.uk. Fair enough, it's your form. The trouble is the server actually doing the sending. Gmail, Outlook and the rest get billions of messages a day pretending to be from someone they're not, so they've stopped taking the "from" address at its word. Before they deliver anything, they run a quick background check: can this server prove it's allowed to send email for this domain?

That check has three parts with unfriendly names: SPF, DKIM and DMARC. You don't need to know how they work under the bonnet. You need to know what they do. SPF is a list of the servers permitted to send mail for your domain. DKIM is a tamper-proof signature that shows the message wasn't faked or meddled with on the way. DMARC ties the two together and tells the receiving mailbox what to do when something doesn't add up.

Set those three up properly and your form emails walk straight through the front door. Leave them missing, or half-done, and the mailbox has no way to tell your real enquiry apart from a scam. So it does the safe thing and bins it. No error, no warning. The message just quietly stops counting.

It gets worse over time, too. Every message marked as spam teaches the system that mail from your domain is a bit dodgy, so even the enquiries that were scraping through start to fail. A form that worked the day the site launched can rot into total silence a year later, with nothing changing at your end.

There's a version of this that's even easier to miss. Plenty of forms send the enquiry from a generic address the web host owns, something like noreply@somebighost.com, rather than from your domain at all. Those often deliver fine, but the reply-to gets muddled, so when you hit reply to the customer it goes nowhere. You think you've answered. They think you've ghosted them.

So what do you do about it. First, run the test from the top of this piece, and check junk as well as your inbox. Do it from a couple of different accounts if you can, a Gmail and an Outlook ideally, because they don't all behave the same way. That tells you whether you've got a problem and how bad it is.

Second, find out how your form actually sends its mail. Whoever built or hosts your site will know, or can find out in ten minutes. The setup you want is enquiries going through a proper transactional email service, the kind built specifically to deliver this sort of message reliably, rather than being fired off from whatever the web server happens to have lying around. If that's not what's happening, it's the first thing to change.

Third, get SPF, DKIM and DMARC set up for your domain. This is a job for whoever manages your domain name and email, and it's usually an afternoon's work rather than a project. You don't do it yourself unless you're comfortable in there, but you can ask for it by name now, and you'll know if the answer sounds vague. "We'll set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC and send you a test from each" is a good answer. "It should be fine" is not.

Then test again, and keep testing every few months, because email providers change their rules and a setup that passed last year can start failing without a peep. Put a reminder in your calendar. It's cheaper than wondering where your leads went.

The reason this matters more than it sounds: a contact form is often the only way a warm, ready-to-buy customer reaches you. They've read enough, they've decided, they've typed the message out. That's the easiest sale you'll ever get, and it's the one landing in a folder nobody opens.