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All you need to know about signatures and spam report/email deliverability
All you need to know about signatures and spam report/email deliverability
David Král avatar
Written by David Král
Updated over a week ago

Sometimes your emails can be reported as a spam. We have caught especially high number of these reports since Google started rolling out a security update to Gmail. It's very unpleasant situation, indeed. Let us explain how signatures can affect the spam score and how to prevent it.

Before we start, we should explain the role of SignatureSatori application in the process. SignatureSatori is an app for signature management - you create the signature template within our editor, add user data and we merge it together and deliver it to Gmail settings. As such, we can't guarantee the content of the signature and the whole email itself. The signature is a standard part of the message, and it shouldn't have a significant impact on the spam score.

Email deliverability issues are solvable if the root cause is identified.

We have prepared a few points which should help you fix the issue.

1. Check your DKIM/SPF/DMARC records on your domain DNS

Having these records set correctly has the greatest impact on email deliverability.
Please check the official G Suite DKIM, SPF, and DMARC help article.

2. Check that all target links are working properly

If you use links in your signature, please check if they are not broken.

3. Don't use "shorteners" for links in your signature

URL shorteners help us especially when you need to share long URLs, but you shouldn't use them in the signature itself. Spam filters often add a negative score for it.

4. Check if you use any third-party email tracking services

There are a lot of services helping you track information about your email (if it was read or opened etc.) These services redirect your original links. You can't recognize it in SignatureSatori because it's usually applied upon sending the email from the client. These redirected links can greatly enhance your spam score. 

5. Check the email content as a whole, not just the signature

Tiny or overly large text, especially in gaudy colors hurts your spam score. The same goes for text set the same color as the background and certain phrases - "must read", using too many exclamation marks, etc.

Another important thing is the text to image ratio. When possible, convert the images to text.

6. Recipient has a very strict spam filter

Yes, it's possible too. Everything is set properly, but the recipient just has his incoming email settings too strict or incorrectly set. The good news is that when the recipient marks your emails as "Not Spam", it will be reflected in the future.

7. Don't forget to set "alt text"

All your images should have set the "alt text". It is the description that will be displayed if the recipient of your email has disabled images - they will see an empty field with the "alt text" instead of them. You can modify alt text directly in code or if you double click the image in editor, there is a field "Alternative text". SignatureSatori sets a default alternative text but it is better to introduce your own.

8. Host the images from signatures on your website

We host the images on Google servers with excellent reputation. But especially if you have link-heavy signatures, hosting them on your website and thus decreasing the number of sources your signatures link to can result in a marginal improvement for your spam score.

I checked everything, but nothing has changed or I am not sure what to do.

You can also test your signature HTML in some of the public services.
Contact us anytime, we can check your templates and help you.

I can't add the protocols now and I need to remove signatures immediately

If you need to remove the signatures immediately to prevent emails from being marked as spam, you can do a signature reset in https://www.signaturesatori.com/app/admin/customer/admin/account under "Reset by setting a blank signature".

And then use the last option "Pause running automations" to pause the automated signature set-up until it is investigated.

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