Mail is going to junk or shows an unverified sender warning

The checks to make when recipients find your mail in junk or see a warning that it could not be verified, starting with your SPF record.

Last checked against Footer365 on 21 October 2026

Receiving mail systems decide whether to trust a message partly by checking that it came from servers your domain allows. Once your mail passes through Footer365, the Footer365 servers are part of that path, so your domain's records have to allow for them. Work through these checks in order.

If your organisation uses the Outlook add-in only, your mail never passes through Footer365's servers, so checks 1 and 2 do not apply: no SPF change is needed, the banner never appears, and Footer365 removes no DKIM signature. Start at check 3.

1. Your SPF record does not include Footer365

This is the most common cause, and the portal tells you when it applies.

Check: look for the yellow banner Action required: update your SPF record on the Dashboard or Getting started. It lists each of your domains whose SPF record does not yet include Footer365. As the banner explains, until the record allows the Footer365 servers, recipients may see a warning that the message could not be verified, and some mail may be treated as spam.

Fix: for each domain listed, select Copy beside the suggested record and give it to whoever manages your DNS.

  • If the banner says Change your current SPF record:, replace your existing record with the suggested one. It is your current record with include:_spf.footer365.net added before the final all.
  • If it says No SPF record was found. Add this TXT record at the root of your domain:, add the suggested record as a new TXT record.

The banner clears itself once the new record is detected. DNS changes can take up to an hour to take effect. Updating your SPF record

Keep one SPF record per domain. Edit the existing record rather than adding a second one: two records starting with v=spf1 can make SPF fail for all of your mail.

2. DKIM and DMARC

DKIM is a digital signature your mail system adds to each message, covering its content. Adding a signature changes the content, so a DKIM signature added before Footer365 would no longer match and would fail at the recipient. Footer365 therefore removes it when it writes the signature in, rather than send a failing one. SPF, DKIM and DMARC with Footer365

DMARC is a policy you publish that tells receivers what to do with mail that fails these checks. As a general rule, a message passes DMARC when SPF or DKIM passes for a domain that matches the one in the From address. If your DMARC policy is set to quarantine or reject, mail that fails ends up in junk or is refused, so getting SPF right (step 1) matters even more.

Check a real message: send one to an outside mailbox you control, such as a personal account, open it and view the original message or its headers. The Authentication-Results header shows the result for SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Anything other than a pass tells you which one to look at.

3. Only some recipients are affected

If one organisation's mail system puts your mail in junk and others do not, the cause is usually that system's own filtering. Ask the recipient to check their quarantine and to mark your mail as not junk, or to ask their IT team to allow your domain. Their IT team can see the reason their system gave.

4. Only some messages are affected

Look at what the affected messages have in common:

  • A campaign banner. Links in a campaign banner go through Footer365's click tracking address before reaching your website. If only messages carrying a particular banner are affected, pause the campaign and compare. Some filters trust a link more when its address is on your own domain rather than a shared tracking address: you can put every tracked link on a domain of your own, such as links.contoso.com. How tracked links work and Use your own domain for tracked links
  • Large or many images. Very image-heavy messages can score worse with some filters. Keep signature images few and small. Signature images arrive as attachments
  • One domain. If you send from several domains, check the SPF banner lists none of them, and check each domain's DMARC policy.

5. It started suddenly

If mail that was being delivered normally starts going to junk, check whether your DNS records were recently changed, for example by a website move or a new DNS provider that did not carry the SPF record across. The SPF banner reappears if Footer365 notices your record no longer includes it.

Still stuck?

Tell us what you were trying to do and what you saw. Include the sender, a recipient and roughly when a message was sent, and we can trace it.

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