Why are my emails to customers going to spam?

Most emails we send for you reach your customer's inbox. When one lands in spam, it is usually for one of the reasons below. Setting up your own email domain properly is the change that helps most.

How we send your emails

Every booking email we send for your store is set up like this:

• Sent from: [email protected]. This is our sending address. It is set up with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, the standard checks that prove an email is genuine.
• Sender name: your store name, so your customer sees who the email is from.
• Reply-to: your email address, so when a customer replies, it goes to you.

You can change the sender name and reply-to address in Settings > Notifications > Who, using the From name and Reply-to email fields.

Do not add bookings.bikerentalmanager.com to your own SPF record. We send from our domain, not yours, so it does not belong there.

Common reasons emails go to spam

1. Your email domain is not set up properly

Spam filters look at more than the sending address. Some also check the reply-to address. If your domain has no SPF or DKIM records, filters are more likely to treat the email as suspicious.

Ask whoever manages your website or email to set these up. Most email providers (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Zoho and others) have step-by-step guides.

• Implement SPF for your domain
• Implement DKIM for your domain

Where you can, use a reply-to address on your own business domain (for example [email protected]) rather than a free address like Gmail or Hotmail.

2. You forward our emails automatically

If you set up a rule to forward the emails we send to another mailbox, the forwarded copy can fail the checks and land in spam. This mainly affects your own copies, but it is worth knowing.

• Automatically forwarding emails from BRM

3. The wording of your email looks like spam

You write much of what goes into your emails, and spam filters read it. Things that count against an email:

• Subject lines in CAPITALS or with lots of exclamation marks!!!
• Lots of links, or shortened links (bit.ly and similar)
• Mostly images with very little text
• Pushy sales words like "FREE", "URGENT" or "ACT NOW"

Keep emails clear, personal and to the point. Use placeholders such as the customer's name and booking details so each email is clearly meant for that person. You edit your email wording in Settings > Notifications > Content.

4. The customer's email provider is strict

Each email provider has its own rules. Work and school email systems are often stricter than Gmail or Outlook. If a customer has marked one of your emails as spam before, later ones may go there too.

Gmail also sorts some emails into the Promotions or Updates tabs. These are not spam, but customers often miss them.

5. It is not spam, the email was never delivered

Sometimes the email did not arrive at all. The most common causes are:

• The customer typed their email address wrongly
• The customer's inbox is full

A customer says they did not get an email: what to do

1. Open the reservation and go to the Comms tab. Press Check status to see whether the email was delivered, bounced or opened.
2. Check the email address on the booking is spelled correctly. Fix it if not.
3. Ask the customer to look in their spam or junk folder, and in Gmail's Promotions and Updates tabs.
4. If they find it in spam, ask them to mark it as Not spam and add [email protected] to their contacts. This helps future emails reach their inbox.
5. If you need to, press Resend. This sends an exact copy of the original email, so if the booking has changed since, check the details are still right first.

More on the Comms tab: Tracking your communications with your customers.

Related articles

• How does BRM send emails on your behalf?
• Which actions send an email to the customer automatically?
• When and How Confirmation Emails Are Sent after a CBP Booking is made