Forum Discussion

rasmusbang's avatar
rasmusbang
Active Member
28 days ago

Can not pass Outlook.com spam test

I am having a very difficult time getting my emails delivered to Hotmail, Live etc and now it seems that I have been blocklisted.

When i run an Inbox vision test, the spam testing passes on 14 cases but not for "Outlook.com". I can not find any reason why this could be.

We have the List-unsubscribe header turned on, there is an unsubscribe link in the email. The content is clean and nice. A test to mail-tester.com scores 10/10.

But still the spam check for Outlook.com fails.

Is there some secret ingredient everyone else knows about or something you can recommend me checking out?

Best regards,
Rasmus

  • Goot's avatar
    Goot
    Practitioner II

    Hey Rasmus! I honestly wouldn't even bother running Inbox Vision tests. Here's what we typically say about them on the Deliverability Services team here at Braze:

    This type of spam test by its nature is not terribly reliable. In the past, I've compared them to personality quizzes in Cosmo and Facebook. The tests do not indicate what the failure conditions are - because they don't actually know what they are. We are meant to assume, I think, that they are looking at content and formatting, though they explicitly avoid saying that, too.

    Instead, they're using static seed accounts to see whether the mail appears or not. That's fine for what it is, but the method largely fails to account for recipient engagement, either by the individual recipients or by a preponderance of recipients at a given domain. Engagement has been the primary driver of inbox placement at the large free inbox providers (particularly Gmail) for a few years now. Seeds by their very design don't engage with anything. So those spam "test" data needs always to be taken well-salted.

    A better approach is to do some multivariate content testing with small but statistically meaningful cohorts of random live recipients from the customers' lists. Strong open and click rates are a better, more reliable indicator of inbox placement

     

  • DavidO's avatar
    DavidO
    Strategist II

    Hi rasmusbang 

    Sorry to hear about your hassles. Sounds like you are doing the right things.

    Do you have a Microsoft account logged into Outlook.com to check if the email actually lands? Most of our emails don't pass Outlook.com in Braze (but do pass Outlook 2019 etc) and still deliver fine to Outlook.com. I also have no idea why they do not pass after looking into it.