A common question we get asked by our community is why do my test emails go to spam and does this meant that all my emails will go to spam?

Whenever you send an email to someone, their email account provider needs to work out if it’s going to put that email into the inbox or the spam folder – and uses a variety of different data points to decide what to do.

It looks at previous emails from the sending domain (i.e. yours) and how the recipient reacted to them. It looks at the overall performance of emails from that domain to all the people who use that email provider (e.g. gmail will look at all people who get emails from your domain on their system).

It’ll see if your domain has been marked as spam from some online resources.

It looks at what’s in the email itself and whether the content would be deemed as spammy.

…and probably does a few more things that no-one knows about!

Anyways, your email account (which you send tests to), doesn’t know your emails are tests… and so reacts to them as they would any email they get.

…and since you may send multiple emails to test and not open or engage with them, you’re actually training your account to put these emails into spam!

…but since every recipient’s email provider will have different data, just because it hits your spam box doesn’t mean it will for others.

If you’re worried about your emails going to spam, you need to use a spam checker tool (Zerobounce, Glock Apps) to see if it is, and also why it might be going there.

Then you can decide what to do about it.

…but remember, sending yourself lots of test messages will mean over time they may go to the spam folder… but this doesn’t mean every email you send will.