Guides for loan officers

How to Stay Out of Spam Folders

By Travis · October 1, 2026 · 4 min read

There is a special frustration in writing a good newsletter that nobody sees. It is not in the spam folder because your content is bad. It is there because something technical, or some habit, told the email providers not to trust you. Almost all of it is fixable.

Deliverability sounds technical, but the fundamentals come down to three things: proving you are who you say you are, only emailing people who want your mail, and behaving like a legitimate sender. Here is how to handle each one.

Prove your identity with authentication

Email providers decide whether to trust you partly by checking three records on your sending domain. If any are missing, you look suspicious by default.

SPF says which servers are allowed to send mail for your domain. DKIM attaches a cryptographic signature that proves your messages were not tampered with. DMARC tells providers what to do when the first two checks fail. Together they are the ID badge of email.

If you send through Gmail on a Google Workspace account, Google walks you through setting these up when you add your domain. If you send through an email platform like Mailchimp or Constant Contact, each one publishes its own setup steps. Either way, this is a one-time job. Get it done and you never think about it again, but skipping it quietly hurts every email you send.

Only email people who asked

This is the single biggest deliverability factor you control. Purchased lists, scraped addresses, and "I found their email on Zillow" are the fastest route to the spam folder. Providers watch for spam complaints and low engagement, and nothing generates complaints like mail nobody requested.

Build your list from real relationships: past clients, people you have quoted, open house sign-ins, and website visitors who opted in. A smaller list of people who know you will outperform a big cold list on every metric that matters, including the metric of actually reaching the inbox.

Make leaving easy

Every marketing email you send must include a working unsubscribe link. That is federal law under CAN-SPAM, and it also happens to be good deliverability practice.

It feels backwards, but an easy unsubscribe protects you. A reader who can leave in one click leaves quietly. A reader who cannot find the link hits the spam button instead, and spam complaints damage your reputation with providers far more than unsubscribes do. Never hide the link, never make people log in to unsubscribe, and honor requests promptly.

Send consistently, from the same address

Email providers trust patterns. A sender who emails monthly, from the same address, with steady engagement looks legitimate. A sender who blasts 5,000 emails after six months of silence looks like a compromised account.

Pick a schedule you can maintain and stick to it. Monthly is the sweet spot for most loan officers: frequent enough to stay familiar, infrequent enough that every issue feels worth opening. And always send from the same address so your readers, and the providers, recognize you.

Keep the formatting simple

Heavy images, flashy templates, and link-stuffed layouts look like promotions, because most promotions look exactly like that. A clean, mostly-text email with one or two links reads as personal correspondence, which is precisely what you want.

This does not mean your newsletter should look amateur. It means restraint is a deliverability strategy. Short paragraphs, minimal images, and links only where they serve the reader will outperform a designed-to-death template in the inbox.

Watch what your readers tell you

Opens, replies, and low complaint rates are the signals providers use to judge you. You do not need fancy analytics. If your opens are steady and people reply to your emails, you are in good shape. If opens fall off a cliff, something changed: your subject lines got weaker, your list got stale, or your content stopped being useful.

Replies deserve special attention. A reply is the strongest positive signal a reader can send. Ending your newsletter with an invitation to reply does more for deliverability than most technical tweaks.

None of this is complicated, but it does require attention. The loan officers who treat deliverability as part of the job, not an afterthought, are the ones whose newsletters actually get read.

I handle the content side of this equation with LO Market Update: a clean, plain-formatted issue each month that reads like a personal email, which is exactly the kind of message inbox providers like to deliver.

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