Why your emails to buyers go to spam, and how to fix it

You found the importer, you wrote a good email, and nothing came back. Before you decide the message was wrong, it is worth knowing whether it arrived at all. A message in a spam folder and a message that was read and ignored look identical from your side, and they need completely different fixes.

There are four common causes. Work through them in this order, because the first is free and the last is the one everybody tries first.

1. Your domain does not prove it is you

This is the big one and it is the one most small exporters have never been told about. When your mail arrives, the receiving server asks three questions about your domain, and the answers live in your DNS settings rather than in your email:

• SPF says which servers are allowed to send mail using your domain.
• DKIM adds a signature proving the message was not altered on the way.
• DMARC tells the receiver what to do when the first two do not line up, and asks for reports.

Google and Yahoo both require authentication from anyone sending in volume. Google’s published guidance puts the bulk threshold at 5,000 messages a day to Gmail addresses and asks senders to keep their spam complaint rate under 0.30 percent, and since late 2025 it has been enforced rather than advised: mail that does not meet it is rate limited or rejected outright.

Most food exporters send nowhere near 5,000 a day, so the threshold itself is not your problem. Two things about it are. Authentication is now what a receiving server expects from everybody, and an unauthenticated message from a small sender has no reputation to fall back on. And the spam rate is measured in Google’s own Postmaster Tools, which you can sign up for free against your domain, so this is one of the few parts of deliverability you can actually see rather than guess at.

What to do. Ask whoever runs your domain, your web host or your IT person, to confirm SPF, DKIM and DMARC are set up for the address you send from. Use those three words. It is usually a few minutes of their time and it costs nothing. If you send through a provider like Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, they publish the exact records to add.

How to tell it worked. Send yourself a message at a Gmail address, open it, and look at the message details. It will say whether it was signed by your domain and whether it passed. That is the whole test.

2. You sent too many, too fast, from a cold address

A domain that has sent twenty emails a day for five years and suddenly sends four hundred looks exactly like a compromised account, because that is what a compromised account does. A brand-new domain sending its first hundred looks like a throwaway. Neither of those is about your writing.

What to do. Start slow and build over weeks rather than days. If the address is new, it needs ordinary conversation on it before it starts reaching strangers: replies from real people are the strongest signal there is that a mailbox is genuine.

And do not buy your way out of this. Sending from a lookalike domain to protect your real one solves the reputation problem by giving up the thing that makes a trade email credible, which is that it comes from the company it claims to come from.

3. Your list is not clean

Every message to an address that no longer exists is a bounce, and a run of them tells the receiving server that whoever is sending has no idea who is on his list. That is precisely the profile of a bought list, and it is why bought lists damage the sender rather than the seller.

What to do. Check an address is real before you write to it, not after. Stop immediately on a hard bounce and never retry it. Keep a do-not-contact list and honour it without exception, including for people who simply asked to be left alone rather than formally unsubscribing.

The uncomfortable part. If you bought a list, some of it is dead and you cannot tell which part. Whatever you load is yours to stand behind, and a stale list is the fastest way to lose a reputation you spent years building.

4. The message itself reads like bulk mail

This matters, and it matters less than the three above. Filters read the shape of a message, and the things that make a message look mass-produced are mostly the things that also make it unpersuasive:

• A tracking pixel. An invisible image reporting when a stranger opened your mail is one of the more reliable ways into a spam folder, and it buys you a number that never told you much. Replies are the measurement that was ever worth anything.
• Link shorteners and unfamiliar redirects. Link to your own site, plainly.
• A brochure attached to a first email. Attachments to strangers are treated with suspicion. Send it when they ask, which is also when they will read it.
• Heavy formatting. A one-to-one business email is mostly text. Something that looks like a newsletter gets treated like one.
• An opening line that could go to anybody. This is not a filter rule, it is a reader rule, and it is why most well-delivered cold email still fails.

How to tell which one is your problem

Send one message to an address you control at Gmail, one at Outlook, and if you can, one at a business domain. Where they land tells you a lot. Everything in spam points at your domain records. Everything in the inbox, with silence from real buyers, points at the message or the list rather than at delivery, and that is a completely different job.

DMARC reports are the other half of the answer. Once DMARC is set up you can ask for reports, and they show you what receivers are actually doing with your mail rather than what you hope they are doing.

The short version

Fix your DNS records this week, because it is free and it is the foundation everything else sits on. Send fewer, better-researched emails than you think you need to. Check addresses before you write to them and stop the moment one bounces. Then worry about the words.

If you want the longer argument for why a small number of researched emails beats volume, we wrote it out in sending small on purpose.

Next: How to find food importers and distributors for your product