You send a quote Monday morning. Nothing back. You follow up Thursday. Turns out they never saw it. By then your competitor already started the job.
Knowing how to stop quotes going to spam starts with one uncomfortable fact. Most contractor email isn’t authenticated, and spam filters notice. So your quote never lands. It happens more than you’d think.
Why contractor quotes land in spam
Most shops send quotes from Gmail, Outlook, or a website contact form. That’s fine for casual email. For a real proposal, it’s a problem.
Here’s what trips the filters:
- No SPF or DKIM record. Your domain has no proof it actually sent the email. Gmail and Outlook treat unproven senders as suspect.
- Shared IP reputation. Cheap hosting puts you on an outbound IP with hundreds of other senders. One of them spams, you take the hit.
- No DMARC policy. Without DMARC, anyone can spoof your domain, and the inbox providers know it.
- PDF attachments on cold email. A quote PDF on a cold thread scores worse than plain body text.
Fix the authentication layer and most of this goes away.
What this costs in real numbers
Say you send 10 quotes a week during the Southwest Michigan spring rush. At a conservative 15% spam rate, that’s about 1 a week the customer never sees. At $400 a job, across a 20 week season, that runs close to $8,000.
That’s not enterprise money. For a small Battle Creek shop, it’s a real piece of the year. And those jobs didn’t go to a lower bid. They went nowhere. You just never showed up in the inbox.
SPF, DKIM, and DMARC in plain English
These are DNS records. Text entries in your domain settings. Nothing to install. You set them once and they run forever.
SPF tells inbox providers which servers are allowed to send as you. Without it, anyone can claim to be [email protected].
DKIM signs every email you send. The receiving server checks that signature against your DNS to confirm nothing was changed in transit.
DMARC ties the two together. It tells Gmail and Outlook what to do when a message fails the check: quarantine it, reject it, or report back to you. The DMARC.org spec has the full detail if you want it.
Get all three right and your domain reads as authenticated. The filters have no reason to doubt you.
Check yourself in 30 seconds
Open MXToolbox email health and type in your domain. It flags missing or broken records in about 30 seconds. Free, no login.
Watch for:
- SPF missing, or ending in “~all” (soft fail) instead of “-all”
- DKIM not found
- DMARC missing, or set to “p=none” with nobody reading the reports
Two or three of those, and your quotes are at risk right now.
What to do next
Comfortable in DNS? Google’s Workspace setup guides walk SPF and DKIM step by step. Once those are in, DMARC takes about five minutes.
Rather not touch DNS? Fair. One wrong record can break all your outbound mail. Our DMARC Audit service sets up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, then runs a deliverability test before we hand it back.
Either way, fix it before the next busy season. Your quotes should win or lose on price and reputation. Not disappear before anyone reads them.
Want a second set of eyes on your email setup? Get in touch. We’re in Battle Creek and we work with the Southwest Michigan trades every day.