You may encounter various spam scenarios when sending an email.

Many email servers have 2 SMTP servers. One is for automated sending from applications like Nylas (this is the application used for ET's email integration), and the other is a smaller service that sends emails from the email account directly.

Since the SMTP server handles the larger sends, it is more likely to get flagged as spam. This is due to the volume spike and bulk sends compared to the individual emails when sending directly from your email.

'Bulking' may also come into play. Bulking refers to email servers' practice of accepting emails sent to their users but routing them to a BULK, SPAM, or JUNK email folder or label. There are various reasons that email providers do this, but Nylas (and Event Temple) don't have any visibility or control over that process.

Often this happens when a recipient's email server starts to receive large amounts of email from an IP address that never sent it email before. Or when recipients of earlier sends have flagged the emails as junk.

It's important to ask your recipients to mark the email as not spam. You should also respect any unsubscribe requests and stop sending to recipients who are not engaging with your mail. Your clients can try to add your email address to their 'safe sender list' (whitelist), and there are also some articles online on how to change email templates to avoid being flagged as spam, but it is more of an art than a science. Here's an example.

We've outlined further details of a few of the culprits and ways to handle them:

To preserve their email sending reputation, some email providers will review all outbound emails through their spam filter before sending. Spam filters work by comparing emails to an extensive list of matching behaviors and giving each behavior a score. If the cumulative score of an outbound email exceeds a set threshold, the email is blocked. Some spam filters look for automated senders like the one we use and add a score for using them because spammers often use similar automated services. This can cause some emails that have a concerning spam score to go over the blocking threshold when sent through the Event Temple provider. Please reach out to your email administrator if you have any questions about their spam filters.

We return that the email was blocked for spam in the API response, but we don't have any visibility into exactly what caused the block.

To optimize message deliverability when syncing your email to Event Temple, it's more important to have a few selective touches rather than blasting thousands of emails per day from an account. Ultimately, the total volume depends on your mail provider.

Unsolicited messages are more likely to raise flags versus emailing an address you already have an email history with. We recommend checking out Mailchimp's guide for common spam filter triggers. Also, you may want to consider something like 250OK

Gmail has some sending limits that they have shared in Gmail sending limits in Google Workspace. For Exchange servers, it is dependent on how the Exchange administrator has configured the server.

More specifically, we recommend that you:

These are the three basic rules we suggest, and we've seen many customers solve sending problems by following them. If you're curious about how Exchange throttling works behind the scenes, we recommend reading Understanding Client Throttling Policies by Microsoft.

Microsoft Outlook has a rigid filter system and a reputation system where if a specific email address is sending a lot of emails but does not get any replies it will get a lower reputation and will be tagged as junk/spam or if it is reported as such. One way to circumvent this is to be added as a safe sender or as part of a safe mailing list on the recipient's end. If emails are still being tagged as spam/junk after marking them as safe then a possible synchronization issue is at play; changing the account password should bring the account back to regular.