Deliverability
Why your first test email lands in junk — and how to reach the inbox. Spoiler: it's normal, it's fixable, and it's mostly not about your DNS.
Your first test went to spam. That's expected.
You verified your domain, sent your first email, and found it in the junk folder. Before you file a support ticket: this happens to nearly every new sender on every email provider, and it usually has nothing to do with a misconfiguration.
Look at what the receiving mail server saw:
- A sender address like
test@yourdomain.com— real humans rarely send fromtest@, but spammers probing infrastructure do it constantly - A subject like "Test email" and a one-line body — a classic spam-filter signature
- A domain the receiver has never seen mail from before — zero sending history means zero trust
Any one of these raises the spam score. All three together will junk a message from almost any new sender — regardless of which email API is behind it.
What Quolle already handles for you
Authentication is the part filters check first, and it's the part your domain setup already covers. When your domain shows verified, all of this is in place:
| Standard | What it proves | Status |
|---|---|---|
| SPF | Quolle's servers are authorised to send for your domain | Set up during domain verification |
| DKIM | The message was cryptographically signed by your domain and not altered | Set up during domain verification (the 3 CNAME records) |
| DMARC | Your domain publishes a policy for handling authentication failures | Included in your DNS records |
| Custom MAIL FROM | The technical Return-Path uses your domain, not a generic one — Gmail shows "mailed by: yourdomain.com" | Configured automatically (the MX + TXT records on mail.…) |
If authentication were failing, you'd typically see outright rejections, not junk placement. Junk placement with passing authentication means the filter's objection is content or reputation — the two things only you control.
Send a realistic test instead
Use a real sender, with a display name
Send from hello@, notifications@, or
receipts@ — never test@. Include a display name:
"Acme <hello@mail.acme.com>" renders as a recognisable
sender in the inbox and scores better with filters.
Write real content
Test with the actual email your product will send — an OTP, a receipt, a
welcome message. Proper HTML structure, a plain-text part (Quolle
auto-generates one if you omit text), and a footer with your
company name and address. Avoid the word "test" in the subject.
Train the destination mailbox
If a message still lands in junk, mark it "Not junk" and add the sender to safe senders. This matters twice over: it fixes placement for that mailbox immediately, and it feeds positive signals back into the provider's filter.
Warm up your domain
Reputation is earned with history. Send consistent, modest volumes to real, engaged recipients for the first 2–4 weeks rather than blasting your full list on day one. Opens, replies, and "Not junk" clicks build trust; bounces and complaints destroy it.
The Microsoft 365 / Outlook case
Microsoft runs the strictest spam filtering of the major providers, and it leans heavily on sender history — a brand-new domain starts with a deficit at Outlook and Microsoft 365 even when everything is configured perfectly. Expect your first sends there to junk, and expect it to improve over the first weeks of consistent sending.
To see exactly how Microsoft judged a message, open the junked email and choose View message source, then find these two headers:
Authentication-Results: spf=pass ... dkim=pass ... dmarc=pass ...
X-Forefront-Antispam-Report: ... SCL:5 ...Authentication-Results— all three ofspf,dkim, anddmarcshould saypass. If any fail, re-check your domain verification.X-Forefront-Antispam-Report—SCLis Microsoft's spam score. 5+ goes to junk. If authentication passes but SCL is high, the cause is content or reputation, not configuration.
If real production mail starts junking
A checklist, in the order most likely to help:
- Check your bounce and complaint rates in the dashboard — high rates poison reputation fast, and Quolle pauses sending automatically if they cross safety thresholds.
- Respect the suppression list. Quolle automatically suppresses addresses that bounced or complained; repeatedly emailing bad addresses is the fastest way to ruin a domain.
- Review recent content changes — new links, link shorteners, image-heavy layouts, or ALL-CAPS subjects can flip a filter's verdict.
- Read your DMARC reports. Your DMARC record includes a
ruareporting address — aggregate reports show how receivers judge your authentication over time. - Watch engagement. Filters track whether recipients open, reply, or delete-without-reading. Sending mail people ignore erodes placement even with perfect infrastructure.
Authentication-Results) and
we'll diagnose it with you.