"As a business owner, I'm continuously having to do things so I don't end up in spam. Less images, specific wording and the list goes on."

We[1] run our own mail and DNS servers and, as you might imagine, have never sent a single HTML email or any email with any kind of "element" in it, etc.

Just plain, ASCII text.

We've got a 15 year clean IP, perfect score on the "mail config checkers" and almost every single email we send is in response to an email from that sender.

And yet ... often enough to make me anxious, we get marked as spam.

[1] rsync.net