If your emails keep landing in spam, you do not have a copywriting problem.
You have a deliverability problem.
Email deliverability is the ability to land in the inbox (or the intended tab), not just get accepted by a server. If your messages are being “delivered” but not seen, the most common causes are weak sender reputation, missing authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), low engagement, and ramping volume too fast.
This guide will show you:
Email deliverability is the ability for your emails to land where a human will actually see them.
Here is the difference:
You can have 99% delivery and still have a deliverability disaster if messages quietly land in spam.
Deliverability did not “suddenly get harder.” Inbox providers simply got better at rewarding wanted mail and filtering everything else.
Here are the practical changes most teams feel:
SPF and DKIM are table stakes. DMARC is no longer “nice to have” if you want consistent inbox placement, especially at scale.
Providers react faster when people ignore you, delete you, or mark you as spam. When engagement drops, inbox placement can drop quickly.
Abrupt volume changes, repetitive templates across many inboxes, and unnatural sending behavior are easier to detect and penalize.
Open rates can be misleading. Inbox placement tests and spam folder rate give you the truth.
Inbox providers use hundreds of signals, but spam placement usually comes down to a short list of issues.
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Your domain and IP build a reputation over time based on:
If recipients ignore you, delete you, or mark you as spam, providers learn quickly.
Bad lists create:
Even “verified” data can go stale fast if it is not maintained.
If you are not authenticated, you look suspicious by default.
Authentication tells inbox providers you are legitimate, and it helps prevent spoofing.
New or inactive domains that suddenly send high volume trigger filters. This is especially common in cold email.
Engagement is a huge input, including:
Low engagement signals “unwanted” mail.
Spam filters also evaluate:
Content rarely causes spam placement alone. It usually makes an existing reputation problem worse.
👉 Related reading: Why Are My Emails Going to Spam?
Think of deliverability as four layers.
Your domain needs correct authentication:
Your domain and IP gain or lose trust based on behavior and recipient feedback.
Inbox providers prefer stable, predictable patterns:
If recipients respond positively, placement improves.
If recipients ignore or complain, placement drops.
This is non negotiable.
Checklist:
If you want, copy and paste this as your internal “pass or fail” checklist:
Before you “fix deliverability,” stop the bleeding.
Temporarily pause:
If you keep sending while metrics are bad, providers keep learning the wrong lesson about your domain.
Minimum list hygiene:
If you are doing cold email, list quality is often the difference between “fine” and “burned.”
If your domain is new, inactive, or recently struggled, you need a warm up period before scaling.
A safe baseline approach:
Then scale only if:
Alternatively, Mailivery automates the warm-up process by running human-like conversations between your inbox and a network of real, trusted mailboxes. That activity signals to Gmail, Outlook, and others that your domain is safe.
👉 Related reading: How warm-up works
If you are doing cold email at scale:
A simple rule that prevents most disasters:
Do not obsess over “spam words.” Focus on patterns that look risky:
Write like a real human would write:
Open rates can lie.
What you want to monitor:
If you cannot measure spam placement, you cannot reliably fix it.
Use this as your baseline operating checklist:
Likely causes:
Fix:
Likely causes:
Fix:
Likely causes:
Fix:
The key is combining monitoring with proactive fixes. Most teams fail because they only look at opens and assume things are fine.
What is a good deliverability rate?
If you mean inbox placement, the goal is consistently high inboxing. If you see frequent spam placement, something is off, even if “delivery” looks fine.
How do I know if my emails are going to spam?
Run an inbox placement test across Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and other common providers. Checking your own inbox is not enough.
What is the difference between inbox placement and open rate?
Inbox placement tells you where the email landed. Open rate tells you what happened after it was seen. If you do not land in the inbox, open rate is not a useful metric.
Does warm up actually work?
Yes, when it creates realistic engagement patterns and you are not mixing it with reckless cold sending too early.
How long does it take to recover deliverability?
Light issues can improve in 1 to 2 weeks with clean sending and proper warm up. A heavily damaged domain can take much longer, and in some cases, replacing the domain is the faster path.
Deliverability is not a hack.
It is trust.
Inbox providers are constantly watching:
Fix the fundamentals, then scale.
When you do that, your open rates and replies usually take care of themselves.
The easiest way to get responses to your cold emails.
