How to avoid WordPress emails ending up in your spam folder
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Often emails sent by WordPress can end up in your spam folder, because it isn’t setting the message envelope properly. So the actual message envelope is using the server hostname which is just not correct, it will work but it is not ideal.
The best way to explain this problem is with an example. Let’s say you have your WordPress website (let’s call it, mysite1.com) on a server with Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) of host.uk.myserver.com. By default when WordPress sends out emails (for example password reminder, new user signup, etc..) it sets your email address from admin area under Settings > General to be the from address header like “From: WordPress <[email protected]>”. The problem is that WordPress do not specify a “Return-Path Header” therefore the mail server software (MTA) such as Sendmail or Postfix, uses your server’s host name as Return-Path instead, which looks something like the following:
This return-path does not match neither the from address ‘[email protected]’ or doesn’t contains your domain name ‘mysite1.com’ that is why some spam filters in the email clients would filter this email as junk mail. So to resolve this we need to make sure the return-path header matches the from address header in all emails sent out by WordPress website.
