We have an email notification that goes out to clients once they submit our website form. It always goes to spam and is not seen until we send a follow up email which defeats the auto send feature. How to keep it out of spam? Do I need to use a third party like Zapier instead?
Hi Ellie. If the email your site sends to the client (that is the person submitting the form) goes to their spam folder, their mail provider thinks that something about the message is spammy. That can be the content, the subject line, the sender, the email addresses on the form, the reputation of the server that sends the email, the DNS settings for the domain, and a lot of other things.
I recommend using a site like this one to get an idea of how spammy your notification emails look to a typical spam filter. https://www.mail-tester.com/
Go to that site. Grab the unique email address that they generate for you. Open your form in a new tab, and edit the notification to send to that address (or if you are using the visitor’s email address from the form submission, test your form and use that email address when testing.) Submit the form, ensuring the notification goes to that address, then reload the mail-tester.com tab. You will see a score based on a 10 point scale, and if you are lower than 10/10, there will be recommendations on things that are lowering your score.
Give that a try and let us know what kind of score you get. I think the link is persistent after testing, so you can share the link here and we should be able to review the recommendations.
Good luck!
Also, if you want to bypass all this testing, you can use one of our dedicated mailing add-ons, which are available to all Gravity Forms license holders.
I use SendGrid myself. They have a free plan which offers 100 email per day for free and reasonable pricing for more than that. The other services have similar plans.
If you have any other questions, please let us know.
Hi Chris, this problem is pretty common with mail servers. There is too much information/code in the form results for them to feel safe passing on the email. Especially on Dreamhost.com for some reason. This is what i do on all of my sites:
- Install WP MAIL SMTP plugin
- scroll to Mailer and select SendinBlue
- Go to sendinblue.com and register a free site.
- Add their txt records to the domain DNS
- Verify the domain
- add API key to WPMAIL SMTP
- Go to the email test tab in the plugin and see if the test goes through
- now test the form mail and see if goes to the inbox.
I hope this helps 
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Thanks Brenda. That’s good advice.
Thank you so much Chris. Can support at gravity forms help me install sendgrid?
Hi Ellie. Gravity Forms support can help you with the SendGrid plugin installation if you need help with that, but you will need to set up and configure your SendGrid account to use with the plugin. The SMTP method explained by Brenda Jansson is a good alternative if you already have the credentials to send mail via SMTP through your web host or sendinblue (and Brenda mentioned.)
If you need support, you can contact us here:
https://www.gravityforms.com/open-support-ticket/technical/
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