Why are recruitment emails to higher education institutions being marked as spam in Office 365?

Email marketer from GMass details that warming up your IP address gradually before sending high volumes of emails helps to establish a positive sender reputation. This involves slowly increasing the sending volume over time and engaging with recipients to demonstrate legitimacy.

Email marketer from Reddit suggests that recruitment emails often get flagged as spam due to the content being perceived as unsolicited and generic. Personalizing emails and tailoring them to specific recipients can help improve engagement and avoid spam filters.

Email marketer from HubSpot explains that improving email open rates is crucial for demonstrating engagement to email providers like Office 365. This can be achieved through crafting compelling subject lines, segmenting your audience, and optimizing send times.

Email marketer from Stack Overflow suggests using a dedicated IP address for sending emails, especially for high-volume senders like recruitment campaigns. A dedicated IP allows you to build and maintain your own sender reputation, independent of other users on a shared IP.

Email marketer from EmailToolTester answers the question about what factors affect email deliverability. In particular this answer focuses on the importance of list hygiene, ensuring your email list is up to date and only contains active and engaged subscribers is critical for avoiding high bounce rates and spam complaints.

Email marketer from Sendinblue shares that one of the key reasons for deliverability issues is a poor sender reputation. This can be caused by high bounce rates, spam complaints, or being listed on blocklists. Addressing these issues is crucial for improving deliverability.

Email marketer from Mailjet explains that maintaining a good sender reputation is essential for deliverability. This involves consistently sending valuable content, managing your subscriber list, promptly removing inactive subscribers, and monitoring bounce rates.

Email marketer from Neil Patel's Blog shares that low engagement rates (opens, clicks) can negatively impact your sender reputation, leading to emails being marked as spam. He recommends segmenting your audience and sending targeted content to improve engagement.

Email marketer from Litmus explains the importance of email authentication protocols (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) for ensuring deliverability. Properly configuring these protocols helps verify the sender's identity and prevents email spoofing, thus improving the chances of emails reaching the inbox.

Expert from Spam Resource (Laura Atkins) explains that IP address reputation is essential. If the IP address used to send recruitment emails has a poor reputation due to previous spam activity or being on blocklists, Office 365 is more likely to mark those emails as spam.

Expert from Email Geeks says that Spam filters are adaptive and always changing and O365 is one of the tougher filters.

Expert from Email Geeks explains the potential cause of deliverability issues. Given that recruitment emails are being sent to higher education institutions, Laura suggests the mail might be marked as SCL: 9, leading O365 tenants to drop the mail. This could be due to recipients marking the mail as spam or other reputation issues.

Expert from Word to the Wise emphasizes the importance of proper sender authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) for improving deliverability. Configuring these protocols correctly helps verify the sender's identity and can reduce the likelihood of emails being marked as spam by Office 365.

Documentation from Microsoft Learn explains that if you are sending bulk email, Microsoft advises following best practices for deliverability. This includes authenticating your email with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC; ensuring your sending IP addresses have good reputations; and providing an easy way for recipients to unsubscribe.

Documentation from RFC details technical specifications for Sender Policy Framework (SPF), explaining it allows domain owners to specify which mail servers are authorized to send email on behalf of their domain. Receivers can then verify the SPF record and reject unauthorized emails, mitigating spoofing and improving deliverability.

Documentation from Microsoft Learn details that Exchange Online uses Spam Confidence Levels (SCL) to determine the likelihood that a message is spam. A high SCL (e.g., 9) indicates a high probability of spam, which can lead to messages being filtered or rejected. SCL is impacted by content, sender reputation, and user complaints.

Documentation from DMARC.org outlines the steps to implement DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance). This protocol helps email receivers verify that emails claiming to be from your domain are actually authorized by you, preventing phishing and improving deliverability.