Why are my emails landing in the spam folder?

by David Serna on October 6, 2017

Email SpamE-mail delivery is complicated, there is an ongoing battle to fight legitimate spam that affects many legitimate emails that are actually not spam, like the one you are sending. In a nutshell, your email message going into recipients’ spam folders is part of the collateral damage in the war against spam.

Your recipients use different email services with their own rules and spam filters and they never give much info about why an email gets filtered to avoid getting manipulated by spammers.

There are however ways to increase the deliver-ability rate:


The big email providers like AOL or GMAIL use engagement based filtering to detect spam. So, if an email gets interaction (opens, clicks, etc) it has more chances of landing the inbox.  If many recipients mark it as spam or you get very few opens the chances of getting flagged increase.

Spam Filter Scoring

There are different types of scoring mechanisms used by different providers, once the threshold of spam is reached for an email, it is automatically marked as spam. the threshold is different for each provider and sometimes even customized by each recipient.

Campaign Metadata

Spam filters want to make sure you know the recipient and the recipient knows you. For example, spam filters usually flag your email more if your message is addressed to the recipient’s email instead of his name, using Feedb’s “first name” email tag helps with this. Same with the “From” field, it is better to use a name and email that the recipient is used to. Spam filters will check to see if you are added in your recipient contact list, telling your recipients to add you is a good practice.

Branded Domain Emails vs. Free Emails  

Using anonymous free email addresses such as Gmail in the form field is seen as a red flag for many spam filters, it is recommended to get your own private domain email set up. Learn more about why free email providers are bad for mass email

Content and Format

The content of your message may trigger spam filters, certain words and images affect spam scoring, there aren’t any specifics laid out but the recommendation is to keep your content clean, use full valid links instead of link shorteners and keep your images consistent with the rest of the content.


Your subscribers should have opted-in to your list and your emails need to include an option to easily opt out

IP Address

Spam filters will flag mass email if anyone on the same IP address sends spam. When sending a mass message thru Feedb your email is delivered thru our servers, so if one other Feedb merchant in the same IP sends spam it could affect deliverability for other users. Our development team is always on the lookout for abnormal activity to keep our sending reputation in top shape.


Keep an eye in your bounce rate and campaign metrics to see if you have a problem. Avoiding the spam folder is about staying compliant and understanding how your campaign looks as a whole.