How can I intentionally deliver emails to the spam folder?
Summary
What email marketers say11Marketer opinions
Email marketer from Email on Acid suggests that using URL shorteners (like bit.ly) extensively or in a suspicious manner can negatively impact deliverability. As malicious actors often abuse them, filters will assume the worst.
Marketer from Email Geeks recommends sending from a cheap VM provider's IP space, such as OVH or DigitalOcean, as these may have a worse reputation.
Marketer from Email Geeks shares that purposefully getting added to spam can lead to email providers shutting down accounts to protect their IP reputation. Suggests using a dedicated IP address and not warming it up as an alternative.
Email marketer from Stackoverflow suggests that sending email from a newly acquired IP address without proper warm-up, or from an IP address with a history of sending spam, can cause messages to land in spam folders.
Email marketer from Neil Patel's Blog explains that using spam trigger words like 'free,' 'guarantee,' or excessive exclamation points can cause emails to land in the spam folder. Also, using deceptive subject lines or all caps.
Email marketer from Reddit suggests that getting your sending IP or domain blacklisted by reputable blocklists will almost guarantee emails will land in spam folders. This can be achieved through spam complaints or sending from compromised servers.
Email marketer from Litmus shares that using sloppy HTML coding, excessive use of images without alt text, or embedding Flash can make an email appear spammy and affect placement.
Email marketer from Constant Contact explains that using purchased email lists instead of organically built lists ensures high bounce rates and spam complaints, sending strong signals to ISPs to classify as spam.
Email marketer from GMass shares that maintaining a high spam complaint rate from recipients will almost guarantee emails land in spam folders. If more people mark as spam then engage, filters will learn to filter.
Marketer from Email Geeks mentions that GTUBE will trigger spam filters for SpamAssassin users.
Email marketer from Mailjet shares that failing email authentication protocols (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) intentionally or by misconfiguration will likely deliver your emails to the spam folder, as it signals to ISPs that the sender is not verified.
What the experts say4Expert opinions
Expert from Word to the Wise shares that a method to ensure an email is recognised as spam is to include 'seedlist' addresses to determine how certain mail programs will act, as these are designed to test deliverability into spam folders.
Expert from Spam Resource explains that sending email to known spam traps (honeypots) will negatively impact your sender reputation and increase the likelihood of future emails being delivered to the spam folder. Hitting known honeypots will trigger filtering systems.
Expert from Email Geeks suggests including a URL that’s listed on the Spamhaus domain blocklist to trigger spam filters. Blacklisted content is the best way to get an email delivered to spam for most recipients.
Expert from Word to the Wise mentions that a direct way to land emails in the spam folder involves the use of specific content (often seen in scam emails or spam) which trigger the anti-spam filters of email providers. This includes urgent language or 'get rich quick' schemes.
What the documentation says5Technical articles
Documentation from Spamhaus explains that sending unsolicited bulk email (spam) or hosting malware are key reasons for getting listed on their blocklists, ensuring that email is routed to the spam folder by many providers.
Documentation from IETF explains that intentionally violating RFC 5322, the standard for email format, can trigger spam filters. This includes malformed headers, missing required fields, or incorrect character encoding.
Documentation from Google Postmaster Tools explains that consistently low domain and IP reputation scores directly correlate to higher spam rates in Gmail. Regularly monitoring and failing to address alerts related to reputation causes this.
Documentation from Cisco explains that poor SenderBase reputation due to spam complaints can cause filtering systems to classify email as spam. Sending volume that results in poor reputation will deliver emails to spam folder.
Documentation from DKIM.org details how deliberately misconfiguring DKIM signatures, or sending email without proper DKIM signing, will lead to increased spam classification. Emails without valid signatures are more likely to be flagged.