Why Salesforce Emails End Up in Spam, and How to Fix It

Email sent from Salesforce lands in spam more often than email from your own mail server, because it leaves from mail servers you share with thousands of other orgs. The fix is to send it through a mail server you control, which SMTP Relay makes possible.

Shared sending reputation

Salesforce delivers email from a pool of servers used by every org on the platform. Receiving mail servers judge a message partly by the reputation of the server it comes from. That reputation is shared, and you have no influence on what other orgs send. If some of them send poorly, your messages pay part of the price.

SPF and DKIM help, but only so far

Salesforce lets you add its servers to your SPF record and set up DKIM signing for your domain. Do both. They tell receiving servers that Salesforce is allowed to send for you, and that the message was not altered in transit. They do not change where the message comes from, so the shared reputation still applies.

Some providers are stricter than others

Outlook.com, which also handles Hotmail and Live addresses, is known for filtering aggressively. Messages can disappear without reaching the inbox or the junk folder. See how to solve Hotmail deliverability problems with Salesforce.

The fix: send through your own mail server

Providers such as SendGrid and Mailgun exist to get email delivered. They manage server reputation, handle bounces and give you a support team to talk to. Office365 sends from your own Microsoft tenant, so your email leaves from the same place as the rest of your company's mail.

Salesforce can hand outgoing mail to another server, but it cannot log in to one, and these providers require a login. SMTP Relay sits in between: it accepts mail from Salesforce and forwards it to your mail server with your credentials, over an encrypted connection. Setup takes ten to twenty minutes:

• Integrate SendGrid with Salesforce
• Integrate Mailgun with Salesforce
• Integrate Office365 with Salesforce
• Integrate any SMTP server with Salesforce

What this does not fix

Salesforce's own sending limits still apply, because every message still goes through Salesforce first. If you need higher limits, ask Salesforce. And no mail server can rescue a message that looks like spam: keep your lists clean and your content honest.