Whether you’re sending out a client newsletter, a lead magnet follow-up, or an onboarding sequence, it’s frustrating to discover that your carefully crafted emails aren’t reaching their destination.
Poor email deliverability doesn’t just affect open rates—it can damage your domain reputation, reduce trust, and limit the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
As a virtual assistant managing client communications, understanding how email delivery works (and what can go wrong) is essential. Let’s break down what you need to know to help your clients avoid spam folders and ensure their emails land where they’re meant to: in the inbox.
Understanding Email Bounces
When an email fails to reach its intended recipient, it’s referred to as a “bounce.” Bounces are typically classified into two categories:
1 – Soft Bounces
Soft bounces reflect a temporary issue with the recipient’s email account. It usually indicates a temporary delay in message delivery.
Delivery will be attempted by most email servers several times over a period of hours or days. It will only consider the email to be undeliverable after a set number of delivery attempts.
What can cause a soft bounce?
- Mailbox Full: The recipient’s email box is full, and their email server has limited the storage space they are allowed on their account. Most of the time, the recipient just needs to clear out (delete) old emails, but this could mean that the recipient no longer actively uses the email account even though it still exists.
- Message too Large: Your email content (e.g., images or attachments) is causing your email size to exceed the limit of the recipient’s email server.
- Temporary Server Issues: The recipient’s email server is temporarily unavailable or experiencing issues.
- DNS Failure: This is most likely an issue with the nameserver settings for the recipient’s domain. Contact your domain administrator for assistance. The issue may be related to the DNS records.
- Auto Reply: Your email has been delivered, but the recipient has an auto-reply enabled on their account. The bounce status will be removed as soon as the recipient opens the email.
- Greylisting: Some servers intentionally delay email delivery from unknown senders to deter spam. If legitimate, the message will be retried and eventually accepted.
- General: The specific reason for the bounce has not been detected.
These types of bounces are generally not a major concern, but repeated soft bounces can become problematic if not addressed. Some email broadcast platforms will automatically assign a Hard Bounce status to an email recipient after a certain number of consecutive soft bounces.
2 – Hard bounces
When an email is permanently undeliverable, a hard bounce error will be returned, and delivery will not be attempted again.
What can cause a hard bounce?
- Email does not exist: Self-explanatory – you can’t send emails to an address that does not exist. Check for typos in the email address.
- Your SPF records haven’t been configured: Your email delivery platform should have given you instructions on how to authenticate your domain. Doing this tells the recipient’s email server that your email delivery platform (e.g. Google Workspace or your CRM) has permission to send on behalf of your domain.
- Mail blocks: The recipient’s email server blocks an email message completely. It rejects it before it tries to deliver it to their inbox. So it doesn’t get in the front door, let alone the spam folder.
Hard bounces negatively impact your domain reputation and should be addressed promptly by removing invalid addresses from your mailing list. Most email marketing platforms will do this automatically.
How to Reduce the Risk of Emails Going to Spam
Improving email deliverability isn’t just about avoiding bounces. It’s also about reducing the chance of your emails being flagged as spam—especially by providers like Google/Gmail, Microsoft, and Yahoo.
Here are key steps you can take:
1. Set Up Domain Authentication (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC)
These three records are critical for proving your emails are genuine and not spam:
- SPF (Sender Policy Framework) tells recipient servers which email servers are authorised to send emails on your behalf.
- DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) uses a digital signature to verify that the content of the email hasn’t been changed in transit.
- DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) tells receiving servers what to do if SPF and DKIM fail—and sends reports back to the domain owner.
Without these records, even permission-based emails can be flagged or rejected. Make sure they’re configured not just for your email marketing platform (e.g. Mailchimp, Dubsado, Keap) but also for your business email (e.g. Google Workspace, Microsoft 365) and website tools that send emails (like form submissions or invoicing tools).
2. Keep Your Email List Clean
Regular list maintenance is essential.
Email providers like Google and Microsoft closely watch metrics like open rates and clicks. If enough of their customers are ignoring your emails – or marking them as SPAM – the email provider may start automatically gatekeeping your emails for all their customers.
Remove or suppress:
- Invalid or bouncing email addresses
- Unsubscribed users
- Spam complaints
- Recipients who haven’t opened emails in the past 6–12 months
Most email platforms let you set up automations to handle this. Keeping disengaged or fake emails on your list can harm your domain reputation.
3. Only Email People Who Gave Consent
Make sure every contact has opted in to receive your emails. That includes:
- Confirmed sign-ups via forms or checkboxes
- Explicit agreement to receive marketing emails
- Easy-to-find unsubscribe options in every message
Avoid uploading purchased or scraped email lists. Not only does it violate spam laws (including Australia’s Spam Act 2003), but it can also cause bulk blocks or domain blacklisting.
Warm up brand new email domains. If you have set up a brand new email domain, gradually increase the volume of emails you send over several days or weeks. This will establish a positive sending reputation with email hosts like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.
4. Encourage Contacts to Add You to Their Safe Senders List
Even if your email is legitimate, it can land in spam if the user’s email provider doesn’t recognise you.
Encourage your clients and mailing list subscribers to:
- Add your email address to their contacts
- Mark your messages as “Not Spam” if they find them in junk folders
- Create filters (in Gmail) or add you to Safe Senders (in Outlook)
Here are instructions for common platforms:
5. Avoid Spam Triggers
Spam filters often look at more than your domain reputation—they also review the content of your email. Be cautious of:
- Excessive use of capital letters or exclamation marks
- Misleading subject lines
- Too many links or large image-to-text ratios
- Common spam words like “guarantee”, “winner”, “free access”, or “make money fast”
Do not send emails to [email protected] or similar addresses – these are often spam traps, and once you send an email to a spam trap, the email host that owns that spam trap could block your entire domain from sending emails to any of their customers.
Plain, relevant, and permission-based emails with genuine subject lines tend to perform best.
6. Let People Unsubscribe Easily
Don’t hide or downplay your unsubscribe link. A visible opt-out process is not only a legal requirement under the Australian Spam Act, but it also reduces the likelihood of recipients hitting the “Spam” button out of frustration.
Letting people go easily can actually help your domain reputation in the long run.
Knowing the difference between soft and hard bounces—and taking proactive steps to improve email deliverability—can make a significant difference in how effective your client’s email marketing efforts are.
As a virtual assistant, you don’t need to become an email infrastructure expert. But if you understand the basics of domain authentication, list hygiene, and spam prevention, you can add serious value to your client relationships.
Email Deliverability Training & Tech Support
Unlike social media, where algorithms can control who sees your content, your email list gives you a direct line to your audience.
… which is great IF you can reach your target audience’s inbox.
You don’t need to become an expert on email deliverability, but it is essential for you to gain a basic understanding of:
- The need for DKIM, SPF and DMARC records
- Email deliverability to help reach the inboxes of a target audience and increase engagement
- Maintaining and protecting your domain reputation
- An easy way to explain all of this to your clients
- How to get expert help