Spam folder in email receiving important messages is a sign of business damage.
This is because, even if senders adopt the best sending practices, there is always the possibility of messages being forwarded to the spam box by mistake. And you could be left without your important messages.
This is because the algorithms are not perfect. It is therefore wise to check your spam folder in email regularly to avoid losing any important messages. You should always check this box for lost messages.
However, this manual method of checking the spam box for valuable messages is also flawed. But there are ways to configure your spam filter to be more assertive.
That’s what we’ll see next!
Table of contents
Configuring the spam filter
All ISPs have a settings section, and this is where you can add specific rules for forwarding important emails so that they don’t end up in the spam folder in email.
You can customize the rules so that the filter is active for certain words in the subject line, or for specific domains. You also have the option of identifying relevant messages that have been wrongly classified as spam.
The filter works according to the rules you set. Below is a short guide to improving the settings of the most popular providers.
- Gmail: when you open a message, click on the three dots on the right and choose “filter messages like this”. Find the “From” field and type in the domain. In this way, you are creating a rule to filter all emails sent by the domain you entered into the inbox.
- Outlook: when you open the “Home” tab, click on “Rules”. Outlook will display suggested rules based on the most recent message, but you can define other rules by clicking on “Manage rules and alerts”.
- Apple mail: when you open the “Mail” tab, click on “Preferences and rules” to add subject line words and other filtering criteria.
So far, we’ve seen how a relevant email in the spam folder can harm the user, but what does this mean for email marketers?
If you use email as a communication channel, stay tuned for the next few tips!
How messages in the spam folder in email harm professionals
Each email provider has its own specific rules for separating relevant emails from spam.
When you think of a free email provider (Gmail, for example), it’s actually offered free of charge to users, but it’s far from free. This is because, in order for it to work, it has to support a very expensive structure: a datacenter with numerous servers, energy costs, teams, connection bands, etc.
For this reason, a message not authorized by the recipient (which could be an advertisement, a phishing attempt or the dissemination of fake news), which ends up in the spam folder in email, becomes a cost with no return for the provider, as it will hardly be read and will have to be stored anyway, generating increased datacenter costs – and the provider needs an audience and relevance.
The criteria for identifying irrelevant or harmful messages are becoming increasingly strict and, as mentioned above, vary from provider to provider.
There are basically 6 criteria to look out for:
- Layout: all aspects of your email, such as subject line, texts, types of images, content distribution, hyperlinks. Let’s evaluate all aspects.
- Sending volume: don’t send large volumes of emails, especially if you don’t have a history of doing so. The provider knows your average number of sends and expects variations in sending to be small.
- Bounces: don’t allow more than 3% of the emails on your mailing list to be invalid, as you could be blocked completely and the emails already delivered will be sent to the spam folder.
- Spamtraps: no spamtraps on your mailing list.
- Authentications: check that your emails are being sent with the correct authentications configured (SPF, DKIM, DMARC).
- Complaints: don’t have spam complaints from users clicking on the “this is spam” button in your webmails.
In practice, let’s give you some more direct tips
When making your email campaigns, avoid:
Uppercase in the subject line: DON’T WRITE LIKE THAT.
Mentioning money in the subject line: “money”, “$” etc.
Avoid 100% image-based content. Distribute text and images in a 60% / 40% ratio.
Use light, compressed images (there are websites for this).
Never copy layouts from other companies.
Avoid sender addresses such as “noreply”; never use non-existent senders and never use free emails as senders (Gmail, for example).
Note how invalid emails are also a problem for ISPs
Another type of email hated by ISPs: invalid emails (or bounces). Here, the villain is not the storage, but the time spent by the provider on connections and protocols to deal with messages that will never be delivered, creating difficulties and bottlenecks in their processes.
This is why ISPs tend to be very aggressive with invalid emails, blocking the sender and putting them on a blacklist. It only takes 3% of invalid emails to do this. In other words, you are classified as a spammer for that provider.
Therefore, to avoid problems with invalid emails and spamtraps (among other types of harmful emails), we recommend checking emails before sending them.
How email validation can prevent a message from going to the spam folder in email
Email validation is a service that specializes in sanitizing email lists.
The process takes place by identifying harmful emails and bounces, which are excluded by the verifier.
This gives email marketers the chance to increase the deliverability rates of their campaigns.
Lists without bounces are not blocked by ISPs and therefore have a better chance of reaching the recipients’ inboxes.
The opposite happens with bases that don’t go through the email validator. As a result, the lists contain a lot of spam, damaging the sender’s reputation with email providers.
FAQ
The algorithm of anti-spam filters is not perfect, so it is necessary to check the spam box regularly to avoid losing important messages. Filters that are not configured manually also send the wrong messages to the spam folder.
Inserting rules that contain certain words in the subject line, or ordering messages sent by specific domains to be received, among other rules to be dictated by the user.
Each provider has its own criteria for classifying spam, but in general terms, harmful emails are those that don’t follow the market’s best practices in terms of layout, sending volume, authentications, bounces, complaints and spamtraps.
A bounce is an email with an error that cannot be delivered for temporary or permanent reasons. Temporary reasons (also called soft bounces) are a full box, a server down, among other reversible reasons.
Hard bounces, on the other hand, are the more serious errors that prevent the email from being delivered permanently. This is because these email addresses don’t really exist.
Sanitized mailing lists are free of hard bounces (invalid email addresses) and other types of harmful emails. In this way, ISPs can be friendlier about receiving messages.