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Gmail and Yahoo tightened sender requirements. If your contact form notifications are landing in spam, this is almost always why — and how sending from your own SMTP fixes it.
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Form notification emails land in spam most often because they're sent from a shared sending address that mailbox providers don't strongly trust — connecting your own SMTP provider, with SPF and DKIM correctly configured for your domain, is the most reliable fix.
If your contact form notifications keep landing in spam, it's almost never a "bad email" problem — it's a sender-trust problem.
Gmail and Yahoo both tightened bulk-sender requirements in the last couple of years. Mail sent from shared, high-volume sending infrastructure — which is how most form backends send notifications by default — gets scrutinized harder than it used to. If a lot of unrelated domains all send "New Submission" emails from the same sending IPs, that pattern itself can hurt deliverability for everyone using it.
SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is a DNS record listing which servers are allowed to send mail for your domain. It's a basic allow-list check.
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) adds a cryptographic signature to each outgoing email, so the receiving server can confirm the message wasn't tampered with and really came from where it claims.
DMARC builds on both — it tells receiving servers what to do with mail that fails SPF or DKIM (reject it, quarantine it, or let it through), and sends the domain owner reports on what's happening.
None of these are exotic. They're standard DNS records, and most domain registrars or DNS hosts make them straightforward to add.
The most reliable fix isn't a spam-filter workaround — it's authentication. When you connect your own SMTP provider (Gmail, Postmark, Resend, Mailgun, SES, Brevo, or anything else you already use) to your form, notifications go out as your domain, properly aligned with your SPF/DKIM records, instead of from shared infrastructure that receiving servers trust less by default.
FormBridge supports this per form under Account → SMTP Configurations — see the Custom SMTP section of the docs for the exact setup, including which fields your provider will ask for (host, port, encryption, username, password, and a "from name").
SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is a DNS record listing which mail servers are allowed to send email on behalf of your domain. Receiving mail servers check it to help decide whether a message is legitimate.
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) adds a cryptographic signature to outgoing email so the receiving server can verify the message wasn't altered and genuinely came from your domain.
DMARC is a policy that tells receiving mail servers what to do with messages that fail SPF or DKIM checks (e.g. reject or quarantine them), and it reports back to the sending domain's owner.
When you connect your own SMTP provider tied to your domain, the notification email is sent as your domain with correct SPF/DKIM alignment, rather than from a shared sender address that receiving mail servers trust less.
One email when we publish something worth reading. No spam — appropriately enough, we'd know.