Most of the time, email landing in the spam folder is a business problem. Campaigns don’t convert, revenue gets left on the table, and the email team spends a week in deliverability triage. That is frustrating, but recoverable.
In February 2026, twenty teachers in Surrey, British Columbia discovered the stakes can be considerably higher. Their story is also not unique.
Attorneys have missed court notices about pending motions and filing deadlines because judicial communications routed to spam folders. Courts have been largely unsympathetic — the spam folder has not established itself as a viable explanation for missing a court-imposed deadline.1 Vendors have been effectively eliminated from government contract competitions because RFP solicitations never reached their inboxes.
What connects all of these outcomes is a single cause. Spammers spent decades treating every email address as fair game. Inbox providers responded by building aggressive filtering systems. Those systems do not distinguish between junk mail and a notice that will cost someone their professional licence.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
What Happened in Surrey
Twenty teachers were told not to report to work after their teaching licences were suspended. The Surrey Teachers’ Association says the teachers missed critical notices about updating their criminal record checks because those notices landed in their spam folders.
British Columbia’s Criminal Record Review Act requires teachers to undergo a criminal record check every five years. Once the Criminal Records Review Program sends a request for additional information, teachers have 90 days to respond or their teaching licence is suspended.
The emails never made it to inboxes. The Ministry of Education and Child Care acknowledged it is aware that emails can end up in spam folders but said it “does not control email service algorithms.”
That statement is technically accurate. It is also, from an email program management perspective, inadequate.
The president of the Surrey Teachers’ Association said it appeared the Ministry knew this communication was likely to be routed to spam folders, and that a conversation had already taken place between the Ministry and the B.C. Teachers’ Federation about the issue. The Ministry knew. The problem happened anyway.
Why Institutional Senders Land in Spam
Spam filters exist because of decades of abuse by senders who treated email addresses as fair game regardless of whether recipients wanted the mail. ISPs and inbox providers responded by building increasingly aggressive filtering systems trained on behavioral signals: engagement rates, complaint rates, sending history, domain reputation, and infrastructure configuration.
Courts, government agencies, and licensing bodies occupy an odd position in that ecosystem. They send infrequently to recipients who did not affirmatively subscribe to receive that specific communication. The recipients may have provided an email address years ago through an entirely different program. The from address is unfamiliar. The sending infrastructure is often poorly configured. Authentication records, if they exist at all, may be incomplete.
None of those factors indicate malicious intent. Spam filters do not account for intent.
The result is predictable: compliance notices, court orders, licensing deadlines, and procurement solicitations fail to reach recipients. The people and organizations on the receiving end bear consequences that have nothing to do with their actual conduct and everything to do with the state of email as a delivery channel.
That state exists because spammers broke it.
What Organizations Should Do
Any organization sending email that triggers legal or financial consequences for non-response has an obligation to treat deliverability as a program management issue, not an IT afterthought.
Authentication infrastructure needs to be correct. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records need to be properly configured for the sending domain. These are foundational signals that inbox providers use to evaluate whether a sender is legitimate. Institutional senders that have not implemented these properly are starting every send at a disadvantage.
Recipient organizations also have a role. Employers, professional associations, bar associations, and licensing bodies that rely on email to reach members for compliance purposes can instruct recipients to add sending domains to their allow lists. An allow-listed sender bypasses spam filtering entirely. The Surrey school districts and the B.C. Teachers’ Federation were in a position to communicate that step to teachers well before any compliance deadline. The Ministry was in a position to ask them to.
Multi-channel delivery remains important even when allow-listing is in place. For communications where non-response triggers a suspension, a missed deadline, or a contract disqualification, email alone is not an adequate delivery mechanism regardless of how well the sending infrastructure is configured.
The Broader Point
Spam filters are doing exactly what they were built to do. The volume of abusive email that flows across the internet every day forces inbox providers toward aggressive filtering, and legitimate senders pay the price. Institutional status provides no protection. Government agencies, courts, and licensing bodies are subject to the same filtering logic as anyone else.
As of the day after the Surrey suspensions, 15 of the 20 teachers had returned to classrooms. The remaining five were still waiting. The teachers were not paid for the day of school they missed.
Real consequences for a failure that was foreseeable, documented, and apparently discussed in advance. Consequences that trace back, ultimately, to every sender who ever decided that someone else’s inbox was an acceptable place to dump unwanted mail.
