Do emails that end up in spam folders still show as "Delivered"?

[44MattWolf44]

We added lots more recipients to our monthly newsletter email because we realized we unintentionally hadn't been sending it to everybody who had historically filled one of our subscription forms. In hindsight, this list increase should have been implemented much more gradually, but here we are.

Even though the email was sent to significantly more people, the click # was much lower (less than half of previous newsletters). You'd think that the # clicks would at the very least be similar to our previous newsletters, if not larger. This makes me wonder:

1. Do emails that end up in spam folders still get marked as "Delivered" by Marketo?

2. Could this single large Email Send have caused our email to end up in the spam folder of folks who the past year have always been receiving (and many clicking/engaging with) our newsletter?

[Darshil_Shah1 · Accepted solution]

Yes, Emails that land in spam folder of the recipient are marked as Delivered back in Marketo.

A sudden spike in the email send can impact the inbox placement, say for instance If a sender is usually sending to 50,000 subscribers and then suddenly starts sending to 150,000, this spike will cause more emails to be sent to the spam folder because inbox providers consider spikes as an unexpected behavior and spam attack. IMO, A significant drop in the open/click rates while deliverability rate being almost consistent may indicate that a greater percentage of emails did land up in the spam folder. Hope this helps!

[SanfordWhiteman]

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1. Do emails that end up in spam folders still get marked as "Delivered" by Marketo?

2. Could this single large Email Send have caused our email to end up in the spam folder of folks who the past year have always been receiving (and many clicking/engaging with) our newsletter?

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To explain a bit further, Delivered is the only knowledge Marketo, or any mail sender, is guaranteed to have that a message was accepted by the recipient’s mailserver.

This happens at the SMTP level.

What happens after the message is accepted by the remote mailserver is completely up to that system. It could delete the message, quarantine it, sort it into a lower-priority tab, or deliver it to the Inbox. Marketo doesn’t have any guaranteed knowledge of what happens next. You might think of Opened as the next level of feedback, but with Apple’s recent rollout of Mail Privacy Protection, Opened ceases to have meaning beyond Delivered.

[44MattWolf44]

Hi Sanford, I appreciate you sharing all this info. In your experience, what's the best way to gauge what your reputation currently is? I know there are sites such as senderscore.org, but I am curious to know your preferred method.