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      Spam Emails

      Why are some emails marked as spam, how Firefish helps prevent this, and what steps you can take to protect your inbox.

      While Firefish cannot directly control whether your emails are marked as spam, we take proactive steps to help minimise this risk. To share our expertise, we’ve created this guide to explain why emails may be flagged as spam and offer tips on how you can prevent it. 

      Firefish only generates the emails and passes these to your email server - these are added to our Outbox and sent from there. As such, it's your actual server that is listed as Spam and causes the blacklisting, rather than the system you use to send the email. 

      What are spam emails?

      Spam emails are defined as unsolicited/unwanted junk email sent out in bulk by businesses to other businesses or individuals. 

      In terms of recruitment, there would be a high volume of unwanted marketing emails to your candidates or contacts about your business. 

      Why are my emails listed as Spam

      Flagged As Spam 

      Your email server can be blacklisted and have your emails marked as spam for a variety of reasons, most commonly your emails are being reported as spam by recipients to their email provider. Email providers will be able to identify if there a multiple reports from an email server or IP and may decide to block emails from this address. 

      Domain Reputation 

      Email servers can also be blacklisted due to their Sending Domain Reputation - this would be your reputation with email providers. 

      If your emails are consistently unread or deleted, this will damage your reputation with the providers and make your emails more likely to be seen as spam. On the other hand, the more your emails are opened, clicked, forwarded, replied to etc your reputation will improve. 

      Your domain reputation can also be damaged by sending large volume of emails to inactive or invalid email accounts. If you are receiving lots of bounce backs, this can affect your reputation as ISPs will see this as you sending junk emails to old, unutilised accounts meaning you aren't using up to date data and are not taking appropriate measures to contact your targets. 

      Authentication 

      ISPs now verify email senders to prevent hackers and spammers reaching their users inboxes using authentication protocols.

      ISPs will seek to ensure your email server has DKIM, SPF and DMARC DNS settings for your domain - these are domain based settings which authenticate your email account - senders who don't pass authentication are more likely to be classed as spam. 

      Content

      The content you use in your email can also see your email server blacklisted. 

      Not personalising your emails to individual recipients is one of the main content reasons people get marked as spam, however having too many images or an email that is only one image can also cause this. 

      Other factors such as excessive punctuation, words like "free", "great offer",  "no fees" and "opportunity", or using clickbait subject lines can also see you marked as spam. 

      What FF does to prevent this

      Email Throttling 

      As well as guiding our users, Firefish helps you to avoid having your email server blacklisted by using a technique called email throttling. This means that we’ll stagger the bulk emails and job alerts that go out from Firefish, sending an individual email to each recipient, instead of one email with lots of recipients, perhaps in blind copy.

      Currently, Firefish sends out emails at a rate of 60 per 2 minutes, totalling up to 1800 emails per hour across all users, in line with recommendations from ISPs. To prevent delays in sending, consider scheduling high-volume bulk emails for quieter periods or at the end of the day.

      If you would like to change the sending rate of emails from your Firefish system get in touch with our support team who can advise on this. 

      Customising Content

      Content within an email can play a large part in an email being marked as spam or not - having personalised content helps warn against this. 

      All standard Firefish email templates are set up with mail merges to personalise these to the recipient - mail merges such as "CandidateFirstName" are used throughout our template and we would recommend retaining these if you are making any edits. 

      Sending Times 

      With so many bulk emails going out during the day, this could result in a rather large email queue. To ease this, we’ll make sure that job alerts are sent out of hours, usually around 2am, so that these should all be sent by the time you’re back in the office and sending more emails.

      How can I help stop being blacklisted

      Authenticate your Email Server 

      The best way to ward off your emails being marked as spam is to authenticate your email domain. This can be done through your Domain Registrar (wherever you purchased your domain, such as Go Daddy or 123 Reg) by adding/updating DNS settings for DMARC, SPF and DKIM records.

      Unfortunately, Firefish can't provide these details as they will be unique to you and provided by your email provider.

      Your IT or Email Provider will be able to support you in this process, and you can find guides on what you need to do below from the major providers: 

      Utilise Good Data 

      As we've learned, sending emails to inactive or invalid email domains can cause your emails to be marked as spam by ISPs. 

      It's important to make sure you regularly cleanse your database, ensuring you are only contacting live and engaged candidates and contacts. 

      As part of this, we would recommend regularly removing records with no contact over 2+ years, with no contact details or CV and records that are irrelevant to your sector. 

      Check out our 6 Easy ways to cleanse your database 

      Sending to the Right Recipients

      You should only be sending bulk emails to those they are relevant for rather than your entire database. 

      You can segment your database using Saved Searches and Talent Pools to create mailing lists based on preferences such as industries and locations. 

      This will mean your emails will be going to the right people and they'll be less likely to be marked as spam - it also means your marketing can be more effective and impactful. Using the saved searches and Talent Pools will make it much quicker to get your content out too!

      Segmenting the database for email marketing should mean that Finance Directors in London don't receive emails regarding HR Partner positions in Glasgow, and as such won't mark them as spam or delete them without reading! 

      Update your Content 

      Having quality email content can help ward off your server from being blacklisted. Check out the below recommendations on content to ensure you are sending high quality emails which will help stop you being marked as spam: 

      • Use merge fields in your email templates to personalise the email to each recipient 
      • Don't use words/phrases in your  email that could be considered spammy, such as "Limited time only", "don't miss out" or "earn money fast" 
      • Utilise clear subject lines matching the email content and don't use clickbait terms such as "Click now" 
      • Keep punctuation natural and professional - avoid lots of capital letters or excessive punctuation such as !!!
      • Emails that are mainly images with little text often trigger spam filters - Ensure your email has a good balance between images and text. A recommended ratio is around 60% text to 40% images
      • Include a Physical Address - Spam Filters don't like when there is no physical address on an email, so ensure you have this on your signature!