Why emails land in spam

Nobody at Gmail decides you are spam. A machine does, from your own record. This page is what that record is made of, in the order it matters.

1. Warmup — a new sender has to earn its volume

When your sending domain is brand new, no inbox provider has ever seen it. A brand-new name that sends 40,000 emails on its first day looks exactly like a spammer, because that is what spammers do.

So we ramp you. Reputation → Domains & warmup shows it as a chart, headed The warmup:

"Each clean day raises the limit by half again. A day with a problem holds it, and adds a day at the end. The last days are much bigger than the first — that is what half again a day looks like."

Roughly what six weeks looks like:

The card tells you which day you are on, what today's limit is, how many times it has been held and why, and roughly when it finishes. At the end the limit is 25,000 a day and there is no ceiling on you any more.

A day counts as clean when: complaints under 0.10% and dead addresses under 1.00%, judged on the last 24 hours — and at least 500 emails sent, because a handful of sends proves nothing either way.

Warmup starts once a domain is verified, and it only runs on one domain at a time. Send your best people first. The list of customers who bought last month is what teaches Gmail you are wanted; a five-year-old list does the opposite, at the worst possible moment.

2. Consent — did they ask to hear from you?

This is the one thing you cannot buy your way out of.

Somebody who ticked a box on your checkout, filled in your signup form, or bought from you and agreed to marketing is a person Gmail expects to hear from you. Somebody on a list you bought is not, and there is no clever sending that fixes it. They will report you as spam, because from their side that is exactly what it is.

We refuse purchased lists at import for that reason. It is not a moral position — it is that one bought list can take down the sending reputation of every brand on this platform, including yours.

3. Complaint rate — the number that ends you

A complaint is somebody pressing "report spam". Gmail's own cliff is about 0.3% — three complaints per thousand delivered. Above it your mail stops reaching the inbox, and it happens fast.

We do not let you get near it. Our own two lines are lower, and they are drawn on the chart:

• 0.10% — slow down. We start sending you more slowly.
• 0.20% — stop. We halt your marketing email. Order receipts and other transactional mail keep going.

Three per thousand is not many. It is why we cap trial sending, why we ramp warmup, and why the unsubscribe link is never hidden — a person who unsubscribes costs you one contact; a person who reports you costs you everybody.

The Health tab of Reputation shows Complaints, day by day · last 30 days — "People who pressed 'report spam'" — with those two lines drawn across it. Days with fewer than 50 emails delivered are left blank rather than drawn at zero, because one complaint out of ten emails is 10% and means nothing.

Underneath, By inbox provider — "where your list actually lives" — has a row per provider (Gmail, Microsoft, Yahoo / AOL, Apple, Proton, Other) with Share, Delivered, Complaints and Standing: Good, Slowed, Stopped, or Too few to judge.

4. List hygiene — stop mailing the dead

Every list rots. People change jobs, close accounts, abandon addresses.

• A dead address is a mailbox that is gone or never existed. We remove it the first time and never retry. Do not try to force it.
• A temporary bounce is a full mailbox or a busy server. We retry for up to two days, and the person stays on your list.
• Dead addresses show on Home under Sending health · last 24 hours. A rising number means your list is aging.
• Spam traps are the danger: old abandoned addresses that providers quietly re-activate to catch people mailing lists they never cleaned. There is no way to see one. The only defence is not mailing people who have ignored you for a year.

Reputation → Bounces explained breaks it into four kinds: Dead address, Temporary, The provider refused us (Gmail or Microsoft said no to our servers, not to your person — our problem to fix) and Our fault (we built the email wrong). Only one of the four is about the person, and we never blame your contact for our problem.

If a segment has not opened anything in twelve months, stop sending to it, or send it one win-back and then stop. A smaller list that engages beats a big list that does not, every single time.

5. The three technical records

You do not have to set these up individually — the one-step DNS delegation publishes all three for you, and keeps them right forever. Here is what each one is, so the words are not frightening.

SPF is a list, published in your domain's settings, of the computers allowed to send email using your name. When mail arrives, the receiving inbox looks up that list and checks whether the computer that sent it is on there. If it is not, the mail is treated as forged.

DKIM is a signature. Every message we send carries a scrambled stamp made with a secret key that only we hold; the matching public key sits in your domain's settings for anyone to check. If the message was altered in transit, or if somebody who does not hold the key tried to fake it, the stamp does not match and the mail is treated as forged.

DMARC is your instruction to the world about the other two. It says: "if a message claims to be from my domain and fails those checks, here is what I want you to do about it" — ignore it, put it in spam, or reject it outright. It is also what makes Gmail and Yahoo treat you as a serious sender rather than an unknown one; both now require it of anyone sending in volume.

All three live in your domain's settings, and once your domain is verified we keep them correct without you touching anything again.

What the Reputation screen shows

Go to Reputation in the sidebar. The heading is "Reputation — How the inboxes see you, and what we're doing to keep it that way." There are five tabs:

1. Health — complaints day by day, a table of how you stand at each inbox provider, and Google's requirements: eight things Gmail asks of every sender, with a count like "5 of 8". Two of them are properties of the sending machines themselves, which this screen cannot see, so they say "Checked at setup" rather than showing a tick nobody earned. That is why the count is normally 5 or 6 of 8 rather than 8 of 8, and that is fine.
2. Domains & warmup — your sending domains, what each is used for, the warmup chart, your daily limit, and your signing keys. Each domain shows a warmup stage: Day 12 of 42, Finished, Paused, or Not started.
3. Bounces explained — what came back and what each kind means.
4. Deliverability — the wider view.
5. Experiments — tests we are running for you.

Home also carries a short version: the Sending health · last 24 hours card, subtitled "The numbers Gmail and Yahoo judge you on" — spam complaints, dead addresses and warmup.

If it didn't work

• Everything goes to spam and you just started. Check your domain is verified (Reputation → Domains & warmup). Unverified means unsigned mail, and unsigned mail from an unknown name goes to spam almost every time.
• It verified but mail still arrives unsigned, and you are on Cloudflare. A record is on the orange cloud. Every email record must be "DNS only" — the grey cloud.
• Your standing says Slowed or Stopped. You crossed 0.10% or 0.20%. Stop sending campaigns immediately. Send only to people who opened something in the last 90 days for the next few weeks. It recovers, but only if you stop feeding it.
• The warmup keeps holding. The card lists every hold as "Day 9 · complaint rate 0.250% is at or above 0.2%" or similar. It is almost always complaints or dead addresses on that day. Mail a smaller, better list.
• Warmup says "Not started". It only begins once a domain is verified, and it only runs on one domain at a time.
• You hit your daily limit mid-campaign. That is warmup working. The rest goes out as the limit allows. Do not ask us to lift it — a lifted limit is how a domain gets blocked permanently.
• One provider is bad and the rest are fine. The By inbox provider table shows it. Usually it means a chunk of your list came from one source and one provider's users did not expect you.
• Open rates look wrong. Apple and others pre-load images for privacy, which registers as an open nobody made. Clicks are the honest number.

Still stuck? Email support@aminoengine.com — we answer within one business day.