How can I best avoid my email going to SPAM?

1. Authenticate your sending domain

This is the single biggest factor in deliverability today, and it's no longer optional. Since February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo have required anyone sending bulk email to authenticate with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, and as of late 2025, non-compliant email isn't just filtered to spam, it can be rejected outright. Microsoft has rolled out similar expectations for Outlook and Hotmail addresses. If you're not sure whether your domain is set up correctly, check with whoever manages your company's DNS records, or reach out to support@rezora.com and the team can help.

2. Don't use bought lists

Unless, that is, you want to ruin your reputation as a sender. These lists very often contain undeliverable addresses that tell email providers you're sending unsolicited messages, almost guaranteeing you a spot on the spam list. These are called "spam traps." The list of reasons to avoid bought lists could go on, but the point is simple. Don't. Buy. Lists.

3. Watch your bounce rate

A bounced email means the address didn't accept your message, and a high bounce rate is one of the clearest signals to a mailbox provider that something's off with your sending practices. Too many bounces can get your domain or IP flagged, dragging down deliverability for every email you send after that, not just the ones that bounced. rezora maintains a bounce list to help protect users, but keeping your own list clean is what prevents the problem in the first place. This is closely tied to avoiding bought lists, since purchased addresses are usually the biggest source of bounces.

4. Analyze engagement, and don't send to stale contacts

Most email tools, including rezora, give you analytics on contact engagement. Use them. If a contact hasn't clicked a single email from you in the last six months or so, remove them from your sending list and move on. Keeping unengaged contacts on your list drags down your sender reputation, and providers now watch spam complaint rates closely, so this matters more than ever.

5. Don't be a stranger

Make sure you know who you're sending to, and just as important, make sure they know who you are. When you get a new contact, send a welcome email and ask them to add your address to their contacts. If your company or a client's company has an IT team managing email, it can also help to have them safelist rezora's sending servers. None of this replaces proper authentication, but paired with it, it builds the kind of sender reputation that keeps you out of the spam folder long term.

6. Don't make the body of your email one large image

Spam filters can't read images, so to them, an email that's mostly image is unidentifiable content. If you want to include an image, back it up with something filters can actually read, like text. A good guideline is at least 2 lines of text for every image in your email.

7. Pay attention to your links

Make sure they're legitimate, and make sure they work by clicking each one before you send.

8. Avoid embedding videos

Most email clients don't support embedded video, and including one is likely to land your email in spam. A better approach is to include an image that looks like the first frame of your video, linked to the hosted video itself.

9. Don't copy and paste large amounts of text or images

Pasting content directly from another source often brings hidden, unreadable characters along with it, which can raise a red flag for spam filters and cause formatting issues. Paste as plain text and reformat instead.

10. Watch your subject line language

Skip the all caps, the excessive punctuation, and the "GET RICH NOW!!!" style language. It reads as unpolished more than it triggers spam filters these days, since modern filtering leans much more on sender reputation than specific words. One thing to genuinely avoid, though: false urgency. Subject lines implying a sale is about to end or inventory is limited, when it isn't true, can now carry real legal risk under state anti-spam laws, not just a deliverability one.