Still Landing In Spam? Check Under the Floorboards
Helloooo — it’s been a minute! I took a much-needed summer breather, but now we’re back at it. So, let’s jump right in.
You're doing all the things "right".
Segmenting. Authenticating. Rewriting your subject lines like it’s your job (because, well… it is).
And yet, you’re landing in the spam folder. Again.
"Why am I still in spam?" you ask. "Whyyyy?"
Here’s the deal: your email problem might not be in your content or cadence.
It might be baked into the architecture of your email house... the nooks and crannies you never really even think about unless something breaks… like the plumbing or the Wi-Fi.
And it takes more than a fresh coat of paint (or a new subject line) to fix the problem.
So in this lesson, we’re walkin’ right past the cookies in the kitchen to check out the parts of the house that make everything work (or break it) — the floorboards, walls, and the quiet systems in the basement.
After all, content is the furniture. Not the foundation.
So, let’s get into the less-obvious things that can cause problems for your email program, starting with a tough one.
Your Business Model Might Be Breaking Your Deliverability
This is the main floor of your home… the area that seems solid (and maybe even stylish!), but is slowly dragging down your email performance.
You’ve cleaned your lists to the best of your ability. Your copywriting has never been more on point. You're targeting active subscribers just like all the deliverability advice suggests.
Still… something feels off.
Because sometimes your deliverability issues don’t come from the things within your control — they come from the conditions your emails are forced to operate in.
In other words: your business model may be setting you up to spam.
Lists that have been purchased or scraped, because "finding leads is hard." 🙄
Email offers that benefit the sender more than the reader.
Targets focused on list growth, not relevance or engagement.
Comp plans that value clicks and short-term gains over trust and long-term loyalty.
All of these things send marketers into a cold sweat, searching for shortcuts, workarounds, growth hacks... whatever's workin' for somebody else.
One big problem though...
The Wrong Metrics Can Incentivize Bad Sending
Think about it, what do you do when...
Your boss wants more leads this quarter → you expand the list.
Sales is pushing for a big product launch → you hit people with 3 reminders in 2 days.
Your CEO wants "everyone" to get the newsletter → you remove filters.
None of these decisions are malicious. They’re just… misaligned. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And they chip away at trust with every send.
How This Usually Shows Up...
High complaint rates — mostly from people who never really opted in to begin with.
Engagement rates trending down, despite you making several attempts at improving your content.
You get pushback when you advocate for better list hygiene or targeting.
Confused execs wanna know, "Why aren’t people buying? You're sending them the emails, right?"
And when you suggest doing things differently — like tightening the list, adding a confirmed opt-in process (to improve signup quality), or sending less often to unengaged segments — what do you hear?
"We can’t change that! It’s essential to our business model."
There it is. That’s the real issue.
What It Means For You...
You can’t fix deliverability with better subject lines if the list is garbage and the send strategy is desperate (at best).
The solution isn't always technical, either — in fact, a lot of times, it’s cultural. And those office politics look different in every organization.
Ultimately though, you need buy-in for how email works for your business before you'll see results that last.
What You Can Do About It
You don’t have to change the whole business model overnight.
But you can steer the conversation to help the rest of your org think more like an email marketer (even if just a wee little bit).
This isn't about teaching people how email works... if you mention SMTP conversations or MX records, you have failed. Back away slowly and try again.
A few ways to do it (successfully):
💌 Translate risk into business terms.
Bring unsubscribe and complaint data to the next strategy meeting to connect the dots between pressure tactics and performance dips.
"Here’s what that list expansion cost us in inbox placement."
💌 Shift the narrative.
Show how inboxing improves when you reduce send volume — not the other way around.
"If we’re measuring for pipeline, let’s protect the channel that drives it."
💌 Frame respect for subscribers as a growth lever.
Trust isn’t a compliance box to check — it’s your edge. Because email is a relationship driver... a loyalty lever... a way to stay top of mind with would-be, could-be, should-be customers.
But you need to get permission, set expectations about what you'll send, stick to what you promised, and follow your data to ensure you continue to deliver value as their needs evolve.
So, instead of…
"How many people did we hit?"
See if you can shift the conversation to…
"How many people wanted to hear from us?"
and…
"What actions did email help drive with those engaged subscribers (e.g. higher-value purchases, faster product adoption, an increase in sales or upgrades)?"
Smaller sends + content that's more focused on those readers' interests and actions = better engagement, fewer spam complaints, stronger inbox placement, and ultimately, greater success with email.
So, let's pretend you’ve gone and fixed everything: your sending habits, your signup sources, your metrics and goals. This place is lookin’ spiffy!
But sometimes the lights go out… and it’s not your fault. That’s the part no one warns you about.
Which brings me to the next not-so-obvious reason for your email fail...
Hidden Hazards and Outside Forces (aka The Stuff You Can’t Control)
Maybe there’s a storm outside. Maybe there’s an overloaded circuit behind the wall that just tripped the breaker.
Either way, your dinner’s still half frozen (yuuuup, it's freezer meal night) and you’re fumbling for a flashlight — wondering if it’s your fault for running the dishwasher, the washing machine, and a hair dryer all at once.
Email is the same... well, similar. Inbox placement isn’t just about what you send — it’s also about what’s happening around your send that you might not see.
Here’s what can break — and why you need to care about it, even though it’s outside your control:
1. Outages at Mailbox Providers (or Your ESP)
It’s like that storm really did roll through, fried your Wi-Fi, and shorted the power in your house.
Nothin’s working, despite how many times you flip the switches and reboot the router — because the real issue’s outside your walls.
This one's tricky because your delivery rates will take a nosedive and if no one flags the root cause early, you can waste hours looking at subject lines, scratchin’ your head over graphs and heatmaps, wondering what you did wrong.
Meanwhile, it's just that Microsoft’s having a moment or your email service provider's (ESP's) queues are backed up.
The reality is, these outages happen. A lot.
Here’s what you can do about it…
💌 Bookmark your ESP + mailbox provider status pages. Check them when things feel off.
💌 Ask if others are facing a similar issue before panicking. The #emailgeeks Slack group, for example, is a great place to quickly find out if an issue is "just you" or something more widespread.
💌 Escalate early — "delivered" in your ESP doesn’t always mean "delivered to the inbox". Check in with someone who has access to dig deeper into what might be happening... starting with your IT or infrastructure team.
2. Human Behavior (aka People Are… Interesting)
People change jobs. Ignore your emails. Abandon inboxes. Or just ghost your emails because they’re busy. It’s not you, it’s… inbox fatigue (probably).
And the more inactive people you keep mailing, the more mailbox providers assume your content’s low-value — even when it isn’t.
Here’s what you can do about it…
💌 Watch your engagement metrics closely (the positive ones like opens and clicks, as well as negative reactions like spam complaints and unsubscribes). And treat your highly engaged readers differently than your snoozers!
💌 Use automations, re-engagement triggers, and create a sunset policy to avoid repeatedly shouting into the void. Find a way to win disengaged subscribers back or let 'em go.
💌 Accept the unsubscribe gracefully. It sucks… I know! But an unsub rarely impacts your inbox placement, and it’s not personal. (Unless you're sending cold emails… then it totally is.)
If you wanna build better habits before the unsubscribe happens, this past lesson on managing recipient expectations can help. It breaks it down step-by-step. (TL;DR: most spam complaints aren’t about what you sent... they’re about what people didn’t expect to get.)
3. Algorithms and Calendar Chaos (... Plus Other Surprises)
One day your open rates are normal. The next, they've fallen off a cliff — but you haven't changed anything.
The reality is, mailbox providers tweak their filters constantly based on new spam and abuse patterns they detect. So, your "normal" sending patterns simply might not meet their definition of "normal" anymore (due to no fault of your own).
And even if they haven't changed anything, and you haven't changed anything, someone in your realm may have. Perhaps…
Your company's newest sales exec sent a blast to your entire prospect list — gotta get that first sale! Spam complaints have tanked your domain reputation.
Someone merged in a segment they shouldn’t have touched and oops! Nobody noticed (except Google's algorithm, which is now sending you to spam).
Your volume quadrupled overnight because your execs just found out that Black Friday in July is a thing now, causing mailbox providers to reject some of your mail.
A shady sender sharing your IP space got everybody in the neighborhood blocklisted and it took your ESP a while to get the listing removed.
Whatever the cause, you’ve got a recipe for invisible chaos brewing in that designer kitchen of yours.
Here’s what you can do about it…
💌 Track baseline metrics beyond delivered, opened and clicked — like bounces, complaints, unsubscribes, and volume per stream or segment. That way, you know what normal looks like — and can spot weird before it becomes broken.
For example, we've got something called StreamScore where I work, which is designed to do just that by combining 26+ performance indicators (including delivery and engagement metrics, mailbox provider feedback, and more) to give you a better view into how you're trending over time.
💌 Identify which email streams are critical and which ones could wait if something goes wrong. If your ESP is the single point of failure for anything important, set up an alternate route (e.g., backup ESP, rerouting plan).
💌 Set alerts so when engagement or bounce patterns shift too quickly, your team spots issues before customers do.
💌 Build a "what changed this week?" habit across Marketing, Sales, and Ops. Tiny tweaks often go unnoticed… until your inbox placement suffers. So, find a process that works for your org to document those changes. Your future self will thank you.
Even the best-built houses can lose power and while these issues — outages, disengagement, algorithm shifts — might not be your fault, the longer they go undetected, the worse they get.
What matters is how quickly you notice — and how ready you are to flip the breaker. That’s why you don’t just need better content… you need a deliverability detection system.
We’re just scratching the surface here. If this already sounds painful and you’d rather talk it through, hit me up. I offer free 20-minute chats to help you start untangling whatever email woe is busting your brain. 💌
Nowww, let’s move on to the one part of the email house most marketers avoid entirely…
Infrastructure: The Basement You’ve Never Visited
(It’s okay — we’ve all steered clear of the basement before. Here’s what happens when you finally go downstairs before something catches fire.)
Down here lives the stuff that quietly makes everything upstairs actually work: the pipes, the circuit box, and that chaotic wad of wires that looks like it’s hiding… is that a possum?
This is your email infrastructure. It doesn’t get ignored because it’s unimportant, but because most marketers have no idea where to start.
And if something’s off down here — even slightly — your deliverability doesn’t just suffer.
It collapses. Quietly. Invisibly.
Until it’s too late to fix it with better content and a smarter send time.
Here are just a few of the gremlins lurking in this layer of the house — the ones that leave you staring non-blinkingly at your ESP dashboard thinking, "Huh. That’s weird."
Authentication records (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) that are misconfigured, causing your email headers to show a "fail" result instead of a "pass".
Poor queue management or retry logic that delays delivery — sometimes by hours (or even days). It backs up like a clogged sink — messages piling up with nowhere to go.
Shared IP neighbors doing sketchy stuff that messes with your sender reputation (like my college roommate, who always fell asleep before taking her Hot Pocket out of the microwave. Your ESP has ways to insulate you from others’ bad behavior, but most protections happen at the config level, which most marketers don’t have access to.
Bounce handling rules that silently remove good addresses — or worse, keep hammering bad ones forever.
Your email infrastructure is a complex system — a set of systems, really. And when deliverability breaks, the failure point isn’t always where you think it is.
Here’s what you can do about it… right meow.
Get curious. Ask questions. And find out where things tend to fail when it’s not content or cadence. It doesn't mean you're shimmying behind the water heater or decoding the blueprints yourself.
Where to start:
💌 Figure out who owns your sending infrastructure. Get names, not just job titles.
💌 Schedule a walkthrough. "Can we map what happens when we hit ‘send’ — end to end?" (This is where having infrastructure visibility beyond what your email platform’s dashboard (ESP UI) shows can be super helpful. Ask what diagnostic tools or logs they’re using to trace your delivery flow.
💌 Look beyond your ESP dashboard. Ask if there are known queue delays, bounce handling rules, or reputation risks hiding under the hood.
💌 Check your authentication regularly. SPF/DKIM can pass and still be misconfigured. You can run a check using Word to the Wise’s AboutMy.Email tool, or just ask your infrastructure owner to confirm alignment across envelope, header, and visible sender domains. (Don’t stress if you don’t know what this means… they will, so you just need to pass it along.)
Seriously though, you don’t need to be the one to decode raw logs or rewire your DNS records yourself — but you do need to know where things tend to fail.
Here’s a quick cheat sheet that digs into where common infrastructure gaps live — and how misconfigurations (like misrouted traffic or weak domain isolation) can quietly tank your inbox placement… even when your content’s great and your lists are clean.
Use it as a conversation starter with your tech team or ESP. ("Hey, which of these do we actually have covered?" is a surprisingly clarifying question.) It’s directly inspired by the kinds of failure points we help customers overcome at SocketLabs — especially those with layered traffic streams and shared infrastructure risk.
Yes, Content Still Matters — But It’s Not the Fix
If your subject line is boring or your CTA’s a head-scratcher, people won’t engage. If your copy’s misleading or aggressive, they’ll mark you as spam. And yes, that does affect deliverability.
But here’s the part most folks miss:
Content rarely breaks deliverability. It just can’t save it when something deeper is broken.
Think of it like the furniture and wallpaper instead — it sets the mood, sure. It makes the space feel polished and welcoming. But if the wiring behind the walls is fried, or the front door’s swinging open to every rando, your guests won’t stay long. Or worse, they’ll leave a complaint.
Working in this industry for more than 18 years, I’ve seen some things:
❌ Teams running beautiful onboarding flows… that never reach the inbox because they get stuck in retry queues, which can delay your messages by hours or even days.
❌ Transactional and promotional messages tangled under the same IPs, ensuring time-sensitive emails like password resets and purchase confirmations rarely arrive on time (if at all).
❌ Marketers optimizing copy on campaigns routed through a domain without alignment — SPF: fail. DKIM: fail… and DMARC doesn’t pass either. This one honestly wasn’t such a big deal a few years ago, but our customers at SocketLabs have noticed strict enforcement of authentication standards with Microsoft, even before they released sender requirements similar to Google and Yahoo’s (in effect since Feb 2024).
TL;DR - Clever content can’t compensate for a shaky foundation. You don’t need to crawl through the crawlspace yourself — but you should know where the breaker box is, how to flip it, and who to call when the lights go out.
So say it with me now: Content is the furniture. Not the foundation.
Fix what’s under the floorboards and behind the walls first. Then re-arrange the living room.
But wait! Before you board up the basement...
“Let’s turn today’s lesson into action!
Pick one email from your core marketing stream… may it be promotional, a newsletter, or an onboarding message.
Now ask yourself: Do you know exactly what infrastructure it’s running through?
→ Which IPs? What domains? → Which rules are shaping how (and where) it gets delivered?
If the answer is “ummm…” or “I think our ESP handles that,” that’s your cue.
Forward this email to your tech lead or ESP and ask: “Can we walk through this one together?”
Or reply here and I’ll send you a few prompts to kick off the convo. 💌”
Want more content like this in your life? Yeahhhh you do.
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