Outlook/Hotmail Spam? Your Email Setup Is the Problem.

It’s easy to blame Microsoft.

You did everything right. SPF? Set. DKIM? Passed. DMARC? Aligned.

Yet your emails still land in Outlook’s spam folder. It feels unfair. Broken. You start thinking Outlook is just the problem.

But here’s the truth:

Outlook isn’t wrong. It’s reacting to signals.

And most developers are sending the wrong ones.

When you use a bulk platform to send transactional emails, you inherit everything that comes with it.

That includes questionable neighbors, inconsistent sending patterns, and marketing-style infrastructure. Outlook sees all of it.

And it doesn’t care if your email is just a simple password reset.

Transactional emails are delicate. They happen in the context of a user’s action. Timing matters. Deliverability matters even more.

If the user doesn’t get it in 3 seconds, it feels broken. If it lands in spam, it feels shady.

You can’t treat these like campaigns.

Campaigns are designed to be ignored. Transactional messages are designed to be trusted.

So when Outlook marks your perfectly clean, on-brand, well-formed email as spam, it’s not about your content. It’s about how you’re sending it.

That’s why Lemon Email is different. It’s built from the ground up for product emails.

Not newsletters, sales sequences, or cold outreach.

Just real user-triggered events with the infrastructure to match.

If Outlook is filtering your emails, it’s not because it’s broken. It’s because your setup is telling the wrong story.

Fix the story, and the inbox opens back up.