To avoid a high spam risk, make sure you limit the use of promotional words such as:
Certain words are flagged by email clients as “suspicious” or spam.
Here are some examples from the finance space:
- $$$
- Affordable
- Bargain
- Beneficiary
- Best price
- Big bucks
- Cash
- Compare rates
- Cost
- Credit
- Credit bureaus
- Discount
- Earn
- Easy terms
- Free
And here are some examples from the ecommerce space:
- As seen on
- Buy
- Buy direct
- Buying judgments
- Clearance
- Order
- Order status
- Orders shipped by
- Shopper
Don’t get me wrong, you can include these words in your message, but use them sparingly.
Avoid special characters and writing in all capital letters. Don’t make obscure choices, e.g., adding spaces between letters, like F R E E.
Make sure the size of your email isn’t too big either.
If you’ve got links, be sure they from reputable websites with a high domain authority.
Your messages shouldn’t be too text-heavy or image-heavy. Balance text and images.
Don’t include too many colors or text written in colors difficult to read.
Common Spam Check Errors
Below is a list of the most common Spam errors you should avoid and the fix for them.
| Error | Fix |
|---|---|
| Refers to a muscle relaxant | Look for the phrases soma, cycl (cyclobenzaprine), flexeril, skelaxin, or zanaflex. |
| Sender email is commonly abused enduser mail provider | Do not use a Freemail from address like @gmail, @yahoo. You’ll want to use your own From email address. |
| No Description Available | Look for phrases:“gold dust””Your…account”“Dr.” “your compensation”And check to make sure the From Address of your email isn’t a freemail provider like @gmail.com, @yahoo.com or @yahoo.com. |
| BODY: No description available | Look for the phrase “Reply to this email…” |
| BODY: HTML has a low ratio of text to image area | Ignore |
| BODY: Message is 10% to 20% HTML obfuscation BODY: Message is 20% to 30% HTML obfuscation | Balance images and text ratio. Problem is likely that the content has too many images and very little text. Sometimes this is a false positive, due to the complex mobile responsive code generated by the email designer page. |
| URI: Uses %-escapes inside a URL’s hostname | This can happen if you are using a personalization tag like %EMAIL%, which SpamAssassin will sometimes flag. You can ignore this because this will be populated at send time. |
| Make lots of money! | Remove the word “lucrative” or “profitable” from email text. |
| You use too many tags in your code | This is usually a false positive. SpamAssassin is seeing the complex code from our email designer and thinking that it’s obscuring content. |
| Subject has exclamation mark and question mark | Remove ‘!’ and/or ‘?’ from subject lines. |
| BODY: Removal phrase right before a link | Remove the word ‘Here” in ‘Unsubscribe Here’ at the footer of the email. |
| Subject contains “Your Family” | Don’t use the phrase “your family.” |
| Accessing a blacklisted URI or obscuring source of | Usually this happens with custom HTML. Look at the source of your URLs for your images. Most likely you copy/pasted a cached image from Gmail that is sourced from googleusercontent.com, which is very spammy. Instead upload the JPG/PNG to ActiveCampaign and insert it into their campaigns via the image manager, or host the image at your own domain. |
| Your message contains characteristics similar to those used by scammers | Remove phrase “your compensation.” |
| A URI hostname has long a (6 characters or more) hexadecimal sequence. This looks suspicious | Check links for long number sequences like some abnormally formatted phone numbers. This can also happen if your account name has a long string of numbers like 1857105312.activehosted.com. Our Support Team can help you rename the account if this is the case. |
| Your message claims to be a “marketing partner” of the recipient. This is often filtered as spam. | Remove the phrase “marketing partner” or “network partner.” |
| RAW: Message contains Dear but with no name | You opened your message with Dear but no actual first name. This might happen if you are using Dear %FIRST%, and SpamAssassin is not seeing an actual first name because the personalization tag isn’t populated yet. |
| BODY: Incorporates a tracking ID number | Look for a very long link or very long word with hyphens like Bestimmungs-Kraft-Session-2-Aufzeichnung that will trigger this rule. |
| Subject talks about losing pounds | Look for the phrase “lose pounds/lbs/weight” in the subject line. |
| UC_GIBBERISH_OBFU | Look for a phrase like “condizioni VANTAGGIOSISSIME quello”, usually a false positive due to long words in non-english languages. |
| BODY: HTML: images with 2000-2400 bytes of words | The message is very short with just a little bit of text. |
| BODY: One Time Rip Off | Look for “one time” or “rip off” or a combination of those words within your campaign content. |
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