How to remove warning banners from inboxes including Gmail, Outlook, Zoho, Protonmail, and more.

Nothing ruins the credibility of your new marketing program and company more than pesky banners appearing in an inbox, warning a user that a message is unverified.

Whether you, your clients, stakeholders, or prospects are getting this error in Outlook, Gmail, Zoho, or Yahoo, the underlying authentication issues are fixed in the same way, which is why we have written our deliverability guide as a single article. In this article assume that if one company is labelled, that the same answer applies to other email providers. This is because, no matter who provides your email inbox, it will be interpreting (and rejecting) the email authentication protocols of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. It is important to note that this guide is for removing banners from the inbox of people that you email.

What does unverified mean in Outlook?

When you see an unverified banner in Outlook, Gmail, or other email hosts, it is usually caused by an authentication failure. That is, the sender of the email has not properly authenticated their email using email authentication protocols including SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. The unverified tag or the message we could not verify the identity of the sender often appears alongside of or in lieu of the red question mark, which means the same thing. Email authentication is highly likely to be the cause of the unverified issue if the above unverfied question mark symbol is appearing in the subject photo or box. Another example of authentication being to blame, is the Outlook error message, the actual sender of the message is different from the normal sender.

How to verify an unverified sender in Outlook and Gmail?

Outlook unverified sender displaying in the inbox of your clients doesn't do anything to help credibility. Stellastra's free email deliverability checking tool will confirm whether authentication is responsible for the email deliverability failure. This fast email deliverability tool by Stellastra will show you whether SPF and DKIM are passing and aligning. Often emails fail authentication because the SPF and DKIM pass, but do not align. Our email deliverability diagnostics tool will prevent emails going to junk instead of the inbox.

How to remove question mark from email in Outlook?

Follow the instructions above to verify an unverified sender in Outlook. The unverified tag and the question mark are both symptoms of the same cause, that is, a lack of email authentication, fixing SPF, DKIM, and DMARC will remove the red question mark from the email in Outlook.

How to get rid of be careful with this message in Gmail?

Gmail inboxes may show the message "be careful with this message". This can be caused by a number of issues with the email, but is typically an authentication error when the following messages are also included, "the actual sender of this message is different", "the sender hasn't authenticated this message", "gmail could not verify that it actually came from", etc. In such authentication issues, pasting the headers into our Gmail deliverability testing tool will allow you to check gmail deliverability issues, providing improved gmail deliverability by following best practices to ensure a professional and credible email delivered to your clients, stakeholders, and prospects.

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