Spam Scanning Service
Email deliverability relies heavily on the reputation of the sender. When a domain or server develops a poor reputation, restoring it can be challenging. To prevent this, HostGator implements proactive email deliverability protection designed to stop spam‑like messages before they are sent. By routing all outgoing mail through a trusted spam‑filtering service, we help safeguard the reputation of our mail gateways—and ultimately, your domain—ensuring your legitimate emails reach their intended recipients.
Reputation Matters for Email Deliverability
Whether a host will accept mail depends largely on the reputation of the sender. Because repairing a damaged domain reputation is difficult, HostGator uses proactive email deliverability protection to reduce the chances of spam-like content being sent.
To safeguard your outgoing messages, all mail from our shared and reseller servers is routed through a spam filtering service. This protects the reputation of our mail gateways and, by extension, your domain.
Spam Filtering for Outgoing Mail
HostGator uses a trusted third‑party outgoing spam filtering service to scan and block messages with questionable content. This helps improve email deliverability and ensures your mail reaches recipients.
The filtering system aggregates reports from multiple sources to determine sender reputation and identify spam more effectively. Several factors can cause a message to be flagged as spam, including:
- Your domain name reputation
- The gateway IP
- The email’s subject line
- The content within your email
- DNS authentication records such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC
Learn more about these essential DNS records:
The more risk factors a message contains, the more likely it will be marked as spam.
Still Receiving Spam?
Incoming mail is delivered directly to the server, not through a centralized filter. Because of this, we rely on spam filtering software installed on each server to manage incoming mail. Incoming filters do not use the same level of aggregated data as the outgoing filter, so some spam may still reach your inbox.
Since other email hosts may not use strict outgoing filters, we take a more lenient approach with incoming mail. To help train the system, we recommend using your webmail or email client’s “Report Spam” feature to flag unwanted messages.