Best practices for addressing spam filters
Table of Contents
2. Allowlisting
3. HQ Settings
6. Keep in mind
7. FAQ
1. How do spam filters work?
Spam filters check incoming email to ensure you’re receiving the safe, trustworthy communications you want. Filters look for a number of different factors, criteria that culminates in a spam score, which ultimately determines if an email will make it to your inbox.
Passing spam scores vary depending on the server, as does the criteria they mainly check.
2. Allowlisting
The best way to ensure deliverability is to implement allowlisting. Allowlisting explicitly tells your firewall and spam filters that communication coming from Axios HQ is trustworthy.
- When sending to an internal audience, your IT team can set explicit rules for Axios HQ communications and absolutely ensure that your recipients will receive your editions. You won’t have to worry about the following advice, and shouldn’t have any more issues with editions going to spam, because your filters will know for sure that HQ is safe and secure.
- When sending to an external audience, if you have a Custom Domain in place, encourage your readers to add your "Send-from email address" to their contact list. If you don't have a Custom Domain in place, ask them to add our noreply@axioshq.com address to their contact list instead. Have recipients keep an eye on their spam folders, and mark your communication as “Not Spam” to teach their personal filters.
The bottom line: Putting a rule in place to tell your inbox that the editions are trustworthy will prevent them from going to spam.
3. HQ Settings
What can trigger a spam filter? The criteria is long and always evolving. Filters are meant to be smart, but can sometimes confuse safe email with malicious ones.
There are a few things you can do to help prevent your emails from going to spam: for some, Axios HQ can help!- When an email address starts with “noreply,” spam filters may see the message as unwanted solicitation. Instead, send from a name your recipients will recognize by setting up a Custom Domain with Axios HQ.
- Sending to a “bad list” can negatively affect your reputation — focus on building an email list filled with folks who you know want your communication. High-quality, permission-based lists will do much better than a list that was purchased, and ensure that your email reputation remains high. Monitor your Analytics with HQ to see if you have high bounces or complaints.
- Specific send-from names or emails could trigger anti-spoofing filters that your organization has in place. This may include using the CEO’s name or email address! If your message is getting caught in spam, try adjusting these settings in HQ.
4. General spam triggers
The following are suggestions for best practice or adjustments you can test to try to avoid the junk folder. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of teaching the spam filter what you want to keep in or out of it!
Including a single common trigger in your edition probably won’t set off a spam filter, but the more of these you include, the more likely your email is to get caught.
Common triggers include:
- Suspicious links, or attempts to deceive the recipient. We have seen links occasionally set off spam filters when they are pasted into a newsletter as-is, long and unintelligible. Put your link behind some anchor text to avoid this!
- We’ve also seen instances of the content within a link triggering a spam filter: see if this is affecting your send by testing without a link included.
- A “Spammy-sounding” subject line, including ALL CAPITALIZED WORDS, words such as ‘Free’, ‘Sale’, ‘Cash’, ‘Limited Time Offer’, etc., or emoji. Subject lines that are very short or very long can also be a trigger.
💡 Additional tip: Include advice! We recommend telling your audience to add the "Send-from email address" to their contacts, or let them know to mark the message as “not spam” if it ends up in their junk folder: some email clients can be trained to recognize what you want to keep out of spam! This is particularly helpful if you are sending to an external audience.
5. Additional Resources
We partner with Mailgun, a trusted email delivery service, to send editions from HQ. Mailgun offers a number of tips and tricks for avoiding spam filters.
See some handy links below!
- How to Avoid Emails Going to Spam: Plus 10 tips to fix it
- Email Best Practices
- Navigating Gmail Folders
- How sender reputation impacts deliverability
- Best Practices for successful email delivery
- Email inboxing: Master the art with this checklist
6. Keep in mind
Spam filters are meant to be tricky! Some folks might report your editions going to spam, while other inboxes might let them through. If you find that you’re not getting the open rates you think you should, contact help@axioshq.com and be ready to experiment with different ways of sending, writing styles, or email lists!
7. FAQ
1. I'm seeing a delivery status "Delivered" for a recipient in my audience, but they haven't received the email. What does this mean?
If your email is displaying a delivery status of "Delivered", but your recipient hasn't received their email, this means that the email has been delivered by HQ and reached the recipient's server. But, if the email did not land in the recipient's junk/spam folder, or another folder, it was most likely caught by your organization's spam filter/firewall and held up in quarantine (a separate isolated place for potentially harmful emails).
To resolve this, we recommend that your IT team:
- Release the emails from quarantine and review the rules that held them.
- Go through our Allowlisting instructions, which include adding our private IP addresses to an allowlist and adding your custom domain (if your organization has one in place with us), as well as the emails noreply@axioshq.com and help@axioshq.com to a safe-sender list.
- If your organization uses an external email security solution, our Allowlisting page addresses how to configure your settings there as well.
2. One of my recipients is showing up as "unreachable", but has a valid email address. What does this mean and what can I do to resolve this?
When a recipient with a valid email address is showing up as "unreachable", their inbox might not have been able to receive email at the time of the delivery. This can happen with newer employee email addresses. The email to them will have bounced and the address was likely added to a suppression list (a list of emails our email provider, Mailgun, will not send to).
To resolve this: Once you've confirmed that the recipient's inbox is able to receive emails, please reach out to help@axioshq.com or contact us via chat, so that we can check the suppression list and remove the individual from it.
3. What can I do if a recipient is still showing up as "unreachable", even after they were removed from a suppression list?
If a recipient is is still showing up as "unreachable", even after they were removed from a suppression list, this status should update after you successfully deliver an edition to them. Please check the status again after your next edition is sent to them and contact us via chat or help@axioshq.com if the status does not change.