Contact forms going into spam folder

There are several services out there which can give you a spam score. For example Mail-Tester, ISNotSPAM and Postmark Spam Check.

You either direct the email to them or copy the full message & headers for the tools to scan. You may be able to read the message headers yourself as they can contain clues to why it's being sent to your spam.

This may be a question for Webmasters, but perhaps you can share one of the message headers (feel free to blank out any email addresses / domain names / IPs).

I won't repeat other answers in full, but the SPF and DKIM settings are worth investigating. You can also look at transactional email services such as Mailgun, but these are paid-for.

How does your contact form configuration look?

If the sender (the one set up in the From: field) address does not belong to the same domain that the contact form is housed, it can increase the likelyhood that it's treated like spam.

See the contact form FAQ for more info.

There are many reasons that your emails go into Spam, here are some of them:

• If you use your server / hosting to send emails, then the server must be reliable and not in the black lists. That might not depends on you if you're on a shared hosts, where it's not configured well to send mails and other users on the host might send spammy emails (which put your hosting into the black lists very soon).
• Your email content. Things like promotion or marketing campaign can easily go to Spams than other transactional emails.

I'd suggest you use an external service to send emails. You can use the SMTP plugin like WP Mail SMTP to send emails with SMTP from Gmail (if you have one) or any other SMTP providers.

There are also some transactional email services that you can use, too. They offer good amount of free emails per month (usually 10k), which is enough normal use.

In addition to the SPF/DKIM and DMRC reply above (which is a great place to start), check to see what email address the email is being sent from. More and more hosts are modifying their outgoing mail servers to force any form driven emails to change the sender email address to the server's hostname (such as [email protected]).

Another thing you can also do to help smooth things out is to plug in an actual SMTP user account. For this, you'll need to use a plugin like WP Mail SMTP or the gMail SMTP plugin. Follow the directions from whichever plugin you install.

Also, you might want to whitelist the email address the contact form emails are originating from within your gmail account.

To whitelist an email address in Gmail, sign in to your account at Gmail.com and do the following.

• Add the address to your contacts

Add the email address that is sending you email (eg [email protected]) to your Gmail Contacts. Google will usually deliver email from addresses that are in your Contacts.

• Mark messages as ‘Not spam’

If Gmail has marked emails you wish to whitelist as spam, tell Gmail the emails are not spam.

• In Gmail, navigate to the spam folder.
• Search for emails containing the domain you wish to whitelist (eg onlinegroups.net).
• Select the emails that are not spam.
• Click More and then Not spam.

You have to read about SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and make proper settings on your domain, from which emails are sent.