Why your event emails land in spam

The most common reason a guest cannot find their QR code at the door is not that they deleted it. It is that it never arrived.

Corporate mail filters are aggressive, and an event confirmation has almost every property they are tuned to distrust: a new sending domain, a bulk send, a QR image, and a link. Nobody notices until someone is standing in front of you saying they never got anything.

The four reasons it happens

1. You are sending from a domain the receiver has never seen

A brand new sending domain with no history is treated with suspicion by design. This is the single biggest factor and it is the one most organisers never consider, because the email looks fine in their own inbox.

Sending from your own authenticated domain rather than a generic platform address is the fix. On AnnexHub that is available from Self-serve upward: tickets, emails and the sending address carry your brand and your domain rather than ours.

2. Authentication is missing or half done

SPF, DKIM and DMARC are DNS records that let a receiving server confirm the mail genuinely came from your domain. Without them, a filter has no way to tell your confirmation apart from someone spoofing you.

This is a job for whoever manages the client's DNS, it takes a few days to arrange, and it is invisible until it is missing. Start it the week you start building the event, not the week you send.

3. The content looks like marketing

A single large image, several tracking links, an aggressive subject line and heavy styling all push a message toward promotional filtering. A registration confirmation is transactional and should look like it: mostly text, one clear link, the QR image, and nothing else competing.

4. The recipient's own organisation blocks it

Some corporate environments quarantine external mail with images or attachments by policy. No amount of good practice on your side changes this, and it is why the confirmation must never exist only as an email.

What to do before you send anything

• Authenticate the domain. SPF, DKIM and DMARC on the address you are actually sending from. If the client insists on sending from their own domain, this is their IT team's task and it needs a lead time.
• Send test emails to real corporate mailboxes, not just to Gmail and your own inbox. Ask the client for two or three addresses inside their organisation, and one at their largest attending company if you can. That single step catches more problems than every other item on this list.
• Check what it looks like on a phone. Most guests will open it on one, and the QR code needs to be large enough to scan directly off the screen.
• Warm up gradually if you are sending from a genuinely new domain. A first-ever send of four hundred messages is exactly the pattern spam systems are built to catch.

Which emails you actually need

Four, and no more:

1. Confirmation, immediately. The ticket and QR code. This is transactional and should be as plain as you can make it.
2. A reminder about a week out. Practical detail: date, time, venue, parking, dress.
3. The ticket again, the day before. Assume a share of guests have lost the first one. Re-sending is far cheaper than handling them at the door.
4. A thank-you afterwards, with anything you promised: slides, photos, a survey.

Anything beyond four starts costing you goodwill and unsubscribes, and unsubscribes hurt deliverability for the emails that actually matter.

The confirmation screen is not optional

Everything above reduces failures. None of it eliminates them.

Show the ticket and QR code on screen at the moment of registration, so the guest has seen it once regardless of what their mail server decides. Let them add it to a phone wallet or save it if the platform supports that. The email is a convenience, not the delivery mechanism.

This is the difference between a guest who can get in and a guest who is an exception at the door.

Plan for the door, not just the inbox

Assume some guests will arrive with nothing. The door needs to handle that as a normal case, not as a failure:

• Name search in the same app, so someone who lost their email is checked in by name in a few seconds without leaving the lane.
• A walk-in flow for anyone who never registered at all.

An organiser who has these two things does not actually need perfect email delivery. An organiser without them is one spam filter away from a notebook at the door.

When email is not enough

For events where attendance genuinely matters — a client dinner, a paid workshop, anything with a hard headcount for catering — email alone is a weak channel. WhatsApp and SMS get read, and in this market WhatsApp in particular is where people actually look.

Both are available as an add-on rather than being bundled, because they cost per message and the volume varies wildly by event. Worth pricing for the events that need it, not worth buying for the ones that do not.

The short version

Authenticate the sending domain and start that early, because it needs the client's DNS. Test into real corporate mailboxes, not just Gmail. Keep the confirmation plain and transactional. Re-send the ticket the day before. And show the QR code on screen at registration, because for the guests whose filter ate your email, that is the only copy they will ever have.