If you run follow-up for a South Jersey real estate team, you have probably sent an anniversary email that nobody answered and assumed the list was cold. Often the list was fine and the message never reached the inbox. Real estate email deliverability for past clients comes down to two things you control: how your sending domain proves who it is, and how clean your list is. This post covers both, in the order we would fix them.
It is one piece of the larger real estate past client follow-up automation system, and it matters most before the spring 2027 push begins. Do it in November, not March.
What the mailbox providers say, and what we could not confirm
Gmail publishes its sender rules in plain language. Per Gmail Help, Email sender guidelines, all senders need SPF or DKIM, and bulk senders need SPF, DKIM and DMARC. The same page says to keep the spam rate reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.3%.
Google also says it recommends setting up all three records for every domain, whatever your volume. A small team sending a few hundred anniversary emails a month may fall below Google's bulk-sender definition. Do not read that as permission to skip setup. The records are a short DNS task, and any email marketing automation we set up for clients starts with them.
The spam-rate target is tighter than it first looks. Google's Email sender guidelines FAQ tells senders to keep the user-reported rate below 0.1% and never let it reach 0.3% or higher. It also says bulk senders above 0.3% became ineligible for delivery mitigation beginning June 2024, and regain eligibility after 7 consecutive days below 0.3%.
In plain terms: if recipients hit the "Report spam" button on a few of every thousand messages, you lose the appeal path.
What we did not confirm. Yahoo and Microsoft (Outlook.com, Hotmail) also publish sender requirements, and a lot of past clients still use those addresses. In this research pass we could only verify Google's current pages. We have not confirmed the exact present-day wording from Yahoo or Microsoft, so we are not quoting their thresholds. Before you finish setup, read each provider's current sender page yourself. Authentication, low complaints and an easy unsubscribe are the common thread, but check the details.
Also note the Google pages we cite carry no visible revision date in what we retrieved. Rules change, so treat this as the state of play on October 29, 2026, and recheck in January.
SPF, DKIM and DMARC in plain terms
These are three short text entries in your domain's DNS (the public settings that tell the internet where your website and email live). You or your domain registrar's support can add them. Each answers a different question a receiving server asks.
| Record | Question it answers | What you do |
|---|---|---|
| SPF (Sender Policy Framework) | Is this server allowed to send mail for this domain? | Publish one record listing every service that sends as you. |
| DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) | Was this message altered, and did your domain sign it? | Turn on signing in each sending tool and publish the key it gives you. |
| DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) | What should a receiver do if SPF and DKIM fail, and who gets the reports? | Publish a policy, starting at "none", with a mailbox for reports. |
Where teams usually trip
The common failures are dull ones:
- Two SPF records. A domain should have one. When a CRM, a newsletter tool and Google Workspace each add their own, receivers may reject all of them. Merge them into one.
- A tool that sends as you but never signs as you. Many platforms sign with their own domain by default. Google's guidance says the From domain must align with the SPF or DKIM domain to pass DMARC, so the default signing is not enough. Switch on custom-domain signing.
- Sending from a free address. A message that shows a gmail.com or yahoo.com From address, sent through a third-party tool, cannot align, because you do not control that DNS. Use an address on your brokerage or team domain.
- Forgotten senders. The old drip tool, the transaction-coordinator platform, the website contact form. Anything that sends as your domain needs to be on the list.
Start DMARC at "none". Google's sender page says the enforcement policy can be set to none for the requirement. Read the reports for a few weeks, find the senders you forgot, then consider tightening. If your brokerage owns the domain, the broker or its IT contact decides this part. Do not edit the brokerage's DNS without them.
Check your own sends in ten minutes
You do not need a paid tool to see whether authentication works. Do this once per sending tool:
- Create free test accounts at Gmail, Outlook.com and Yahoo, or use ones you already have.
- Send a real anniversary email, with a real link and image, from the same tool and address the campaign will use.
- In Gmail, open the message, choose "Show original" from the three-dot menu, and read the summary at the top. You want to see SPF, DKIM and DMARC each marked PASS.
- Note whether it landed in Primary, Promotions or Spam. Do the same in the other two accounts.
- If any shows FAIL or none, fix that sender before you send to a single client.
Promotions is not a failure. A message that looks like a newsletter often goes there. Spam is the failure. Plain, short messages from a named agent tend to look less like marketing, which is one reason the home anniversary emails built from CRM fields we describe elsewhere work better as short notes than as designed templates.
Also register your sending domain with Google Postmaster Tools, the dashboard Google points to for spam-rate data. If your volume is too low for it to show data, rely on the complaint and bounce reports inside your sending tool instead. We have not tested what volume makes Postmaster Tools populate, so we will not guess a number.
List hygiene: the part a DNS record cannot fix
Perfect authentication does not rescue a stale list. A buyer who closed in 2018 may have changed jobs, abandoned an address, or forgotten you. Sending to them risks bounces, which tell providers you do not know your recipients, and spam reports, which are the number Google watches.
Our rules for a past-client list before any campaign:
- Remove hard bounces at once. A hard bounce means the address does not exist. Your sending tool should suppress it automatically. Confirm it does.
- Honor unsubscribes in every system. If a client opts out of the newsletter tool, the CRM's drip must know too. Two systems with two opt-out lists is how someone gets emailed after asking to stop.
- Separate "valid" from "recent". A working address with no reply, click or contact in a long stretch is a risk. Pick your own cutoff, such as 18 or 24 months, and move those contacts to a gentler re-permission sequence. That number is our suggestion, not a provider standard.
- Do not trust open counts alone. Mail apps can load images automatically, which inflates opens. Use clicks and replies as the signal that a person is there.
- Fix the typos at the source. gmial.com and a missing letter in a surname-based address cause bounces. Clean them when the agent updates the contact, not in a yearly sweep.
Most of this depends on having the right fields in the CRM in the first place. Our past-client list audit and its six required fields covers email status, last contact date and consent source, which are exactly what the rules above need.
Ramp up, don't blast
A list that has sat unused for two years and then receives 2,000 emails on one Tuesday looks like a purchased list to a mailbox provider. We have not found a published, provider-confirmed ramp schedule, so treat this as practice, not a rule: start with your most recent and most engaged clients, send to a few hundred, watch bounces and complaints for a few days, then widen the audience.
Spread it out. The calendar in our January-to-March follow-up plan for the spring 2027 market already staggers touches by segment, which also keeps volume steady rather than spiky.
Two further habits help:
- Send from a person. A message from a named agent with a monitored reply-to address invites replies. Replies are a strong sign of a wanted message. A no-reply address removes that and annoys recipients.
- Keep the unsubscribe link visible. A client who cannot find it will click "Report spam" instead, and that button is the one that hurts you. Questions about what the law requires in your emails belong with your own attorney or compliance contact.
Who owns this on the team
Deliverability fails when everyone assumes someone else owns it. Name one person, usually the operations or marketing lead, who owns four things: the DNS records, the list of sending tools, the monthly check, and the suppression list. Write the list of sending tools down. When a new agent connects a personal newsletter account or a lead-gen vendor sends "from the team", that is a new sender nobody authenticated.
A monthly routine can fit in half an hour: send the three-inbox test, read the DMARC reports, glance at bounce and complaint figures in the sending tool, and confirm the unsubscribe list matches across systems. If a figure jumps after a campaign, pause the next one and find out why before you send more.
When the CRM and the email tool are separate products, the two lists drift. That is the argument for connecting them: one record of who is subscribed, who bounced and who replied. We build that connection as part of our work on CRM-connected lifecycle email. Whatever tool you use, the checks above still apply.
One boundary: for a brokerage, those lists would live in the custom real estate CRM we design around lead routing and agent follow-up. We do not resell hosting or run your domain registrar, and we cannot see your DNS unless you give us access. Domain, email hosting and third-party tool subscriptions are separate costs, scoped separately in any proposal.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do my real estate drip emails go to spam?
The usual causes are missing or misaligned SPF, DKIM or DMARC records, a stale list that produces bounces, and recipients clicking "Report spam". Google's guidelines tell senders to keep user-reported spam below 0.1% and never reach 0.3%. Check authentication first, then clean the list, then slow the send volume.
Do I need DMARC if I only email a few hundred past clients?
Google requires DMARC for bulk senders, and its sender guidelines recommend setting up SPF, DKIM and DMARC for every domain. A small team may fall below the bulk threshold, but the record is cheap to add. Start with a "none" policy, which Google says is enough for the requirement, and read the reports.
How do I check whether SPF, DKIM and DMARC pass?
Send a real campaign email to a Gmail account you control. Open it, choose "Show original", and read the summary at the top. You want SPF, DKIM and DMARC each showing PASS. Repeat for each tool that sends as your domain, because each one is authenticated separately.
How often should I clean a past-client email list?
Remove hard bounces and unsubscribes automatically after every send, and review quiet contacts at least once a year, ahead of your main campaign. The inactivity cutoff, such as 18 or 24 months, is a judgment call for your team. No provider publishes one standard number.