Why Are My Email Review Requests Being Rejected? A Guide to 2025 Deliverability Rules
If your customer review requests are failing to get a response, the email may not be delivered at all.
Recent, coordinated changes by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft mean that emails from domains with a poor sender reputation are now rejected outright, never even reaching a spam folder.
This guide explains why this is happening and the exact steps you need to take to ensure your critical emails reach the inbox.
What are the new email deliverability rules for 2025?
The new email rules, enforced jointly by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, require all bulk senders to maintain a user-reported spam complaint rate below 0.1% and properly authenticate their domain using the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC protocols.
This represents a fundamental shift in email delivery.
Previously, suspicious emails were often sent to a junk or spam folder; now, non-compliant messages are frequently rejected at the server level, resulting in a complete failure of communication.
Why are my emails being rejected instead of going to spam?
Your emails are being rejected because major inbox providers like Google and Microsoft now treat email delivery like a gated community, where only trusted senders are granted entry.
An email failing to meet the new, higher standards of authentication and sender reputation is no longer relegated to a secondary folder; it is denied entry entirely.
For services that depend on email, like review requests, a rejected message means a 100% loss of that customer interaction.
What is email sender reputation?
Email sender reputation is an invisible "credit score" for your business domain that email providers use to determine if your messages are trustworthy and should be delivered to the inbox.
This reputation is built slowly over time through positive sending behavior and can be damaged very quickly by actions that generate spam complaints.
Email providers see this score as a primary indicator of your email quality.
Your sender reputation is composed of two key elements:
Domain Reputation: The long-term history and trust associated with your primary sending domain (e.g.,
yourbusiness.com). This is the most important factor for providers like Google.IP Reputation: The reputation of the specific server sending your email. This is often considered secondary to your domain's overall reputation.
What is the maximum allowed spam complaint rate?
Senders are now required to keep their user-reported spam complaint rate below 0.1%, which means you are allowed only one spam complaint for every 1,000 emails sent.
This is an extremely unforgiving threshold. For example, if you send 5,000 emails in a month, just six recipients marking your message as spam is enough to push your domain into a reputational danger zone, risking future rejections.
Why is my old marketing email address a liability?
An old marketing email address is a liability because it likely carries "reputation debt" from past campaigns that received spam complaints, which lowers the sender score for your entire domain.
If an address like contact@yourbusiness.com was ever used for a cold email campaign, a newsletter to a purchased list, or any non-permission-based marketing, its history of spam complaints degrades the reputation of yourbusiness.com as a whole.
Sending a critical review request from this tainted address is like applying for a loan with a bad credit history; it is viewed with suspicion and is likely to be rejected.
What is the best way to separate marketing and transactional emails?
The industry best practice for protecting critical emails is to use a separate subdomain for all marketing, sales outreach, and newsletter communications (e.g., marketing.yourbusiness.com).
Mailbox providers often track reputation at the subdomain level.
This means any negative impact from a higher-risk marketing campaign, like spam complaints or unsubscribes, will be contained to the subdomain, preserving the pristine reputation of your primary domain.
How to Guarantee Your Review Requests Are Delivered
To ensure your most important transactional emails—like review requests sent via a service like ReviewNow.org—are successfully delivered, you must build a firewall between your email streams and perform a technical health check.
Step 1: Audit Your Current Sending Address
Honestly assess the email address you plan to use for critical communications.
Has this address ever been used for cold emails, marketing to a non-opt-in list, or any other bulk promotional mailing?
If the answer is "yes" or even "maybe," that address is carrying reputation debt and is not safe to use for essential messages.
Step 2: Choose a Pristine Sending Address
Select or create a new, clean address from your main business domain that will be dedicated exclusively to high-trust communications.
This address should be monitored for replies, as using a "no-reply" address is a poor practice that signals you are not open to two-way communication.
Excellent choices include:
feedback@yourbusiness.comreviews@yourbusiness.comsupport@yourbusiness.com
Step 3: Conduct a Technical Health Check
Contact your IT provider or webmaster to confirm your domain has the required technical protocols in place.
These three records—SPF, DKIM, and DMARC—are a non-negotiable requirement for email deliverability. They act as a digital passport system, proving to receiving servers that your emails are genuinely from you.
You can send your IT team this simple request:
"We need to ensure our domain
yourbusiness.comis compliant with the new 2025 Google and Microsoft email rules. Can you please confirm that we have SPF, DKIM, and a basic DMARC record set up correctly for our main domain?"
By protecting your sender reputation and implementing these technical standards, you ensure that your most valuable customer interactions have the highest possible chance of reaching the inbox.
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