Why Are Braze Emails Going to Spam?

Braze emails usually go to spam for one of four reasons: the dedicated IPs were never properly warmed (or went cold and weren't re-warmed), a campaign or Canvas suddenly mailed far more people than usual, the audience includes app users who never asked for email or stopped reading it long ago, or authentication doesn't line up with the From domain. Braze hands your mail to an underlying sending service and gives you the controls. Who you mail, and how much, is up to you.

Braze is built for mobile and lifecycle marketing, which shapes how its spam problems show up. Most Braze senders have a large user base from an app or website, and it's easy to point an email at all of it.

How Braze sends email

A few things about the setup matter for deliverability:

• An underlying ESP. Braze sends through Amazon SES by default for new setups, and also works with SendGrid and SparkPost. You configure the domains in Braze, but the delivery infrastructure belongs to one of those providers.
• Dedicated IPs in pools. Braze's setup docs are written around dedicated IPs, grouped into IP pools so you can keep, for example, promotional and transactional mail on separate reputations. A dedicated IP means your reputation is yours alone, good or bad. Nobody else drags it down, and nobody else props it up.
• A sending subdomain. Braze requires a subdomain of a domain you own, such as mail.example.com, plus a tracking (click) domain, which Braze recommends matching to the sending domain. It also has you publish a reverse DNS record that ties your IP to the sending subdomain.

The common causes, most likely first

1. Volume spikes and cold IPs

This is the classic Braze problem. A team launches a new Canvas or a big announcement to every user with an email address, volume jumps from thousands to hundreds of thousands in a day, and Gmail and Microsoft treat the jump as suspicious. Mailbox providers judge new or unfamiliar volume cautiously.

Braze's own warming guidance is conservative for good reason. Its schedules start at 50 emails on day one, and the conservative schedule reaches 8,000 a day by day 21. Braze also says not to skip days, to warm to your average daily volume rather than your peak, and that a month without sending means warming again. If your IPs sat idle for three months, Braze may recycle and reassign them, and the new ones need a full warm-up.

2. Mailing people who never engage

Braze defaults campaigns and Canvases to users who are "subscribed or opted-in." In Braze, "subscribed" is the default state when a user profile is created. It means the user has neither unsubscribed nor explicitly opted in, which isn't the same as someone who asked for marketing email. If your app creates users at sign-up and marks them subscribed, your marketing audience may include a lot of people who signed up once, never opened anything, and will report your email as spam or ignore it.

Low engagement and spam complaints are the two signals Gmail and Yahoo weigh most. Braze gives you the option to send to "opted-in users only," and you can build segments on email engagement.

3. Old and bad addresses

Lifecycle programs that have run for years accumulate dead addresses, typo domains and recycled addresses that have become spam traps. Braze's docs recommend confirmed opt-in and a sunset policy, and warn never to buy lists. If you've imported a large list from an older system, check its age and source before mailing it. See how to find and remove spam traps and emailing an old list.

4. Authentication that doesn't align

Braze sets up SPF and DKIM for your sending domain, and its troubleshooting guidance makes the same point every DMARC guide does: DMARC passes only when SPF or DKIM aligns with the From domain. Problems come from sending with a From address on a domain you didn't set up in Braze, or from a missing DMARC record. Braze's docs call DMARC optional; Gmail and Yahoo require it for bulk senders (Google's line is about 5,000 or more messages a day to Gmail accounts). See the Gmail and Yahoo bulk sender requirements.

5. Mixed traffic on one IP pool

Password resets and order confirmations sharing an IP pool with promotional blasts means a bad campaign can delay or junk the mail users actually need. Braze's IP pools exist to separate these. If you have one pool doing everything, that's worth fixing.

6. The unsubscribe header isn't on

Braze's one-click list-unsubscribe header is a workspace setting you turn on (choose "Braze default" under email preferences). It's added to sends targeting subscribed or opted-in users. Gmail and Yahoo require one-click unsubscribe for bulk marketing mail. People who can't easily unsubscribe report spam instead.

How to fix it, step by step

1. Read the headers of a message that landed in spam. Use the header analyzer and look for dkim=pass with your domain and dmarc=pass. If DMARC fails, see DMARC fail.
2. Check your DNS from outside Braze. Run the sending domain through the email checker. Publish a DMARC record if you don't have one; the DMARC generator will build one. Braze suggests setting it on the organizational domain so it covers all subdomains.
3. Look at your volume history. Compare daily sends for the last 60 days against when spam placement started. A spike, or a send after a long quiet stretch, is the usual trigger.
4. Narrow the audience. Temporarily send only to users who opened or clicked email recently. Build a segment for it and use it on every campaign until placement recovers.
5. Re-warm if needed. If volume dropped off or the IPs were reassigned, follow Braze's conservative schedule and increase daily without skipping days.
6. Separate transactional and marketing traffic into different IP pools if they share one.
7. Turn on the one-click unsubscribe header in workspace email preferences.
8. Put a sunset policy in place so users who haven't engaged in several months stop receiving marketing email.

How to confirm it's fixed

Check Google Postmaster Tools for spam rate and authentication, Microsoft SNDS for your dedicated IPs, and Braze's own bounce and spam complaint reporting. Send to a set of seed mailboxes at Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo before each large send while you recover. Expect gradual improvement over two to four weeks, not an overnight change.

How to keep it from coming back

• Treat any send to "all users" as a volume event. Ramp it, or split it over several days.
• Keep marketing segments engagement-based by default.
• Keep IPs in use at a steady daily volume rather than in bursts.
• Watch spam rate weekly in Postmaster Tools, not just during incidents. See Gmail spam rate threshold.

If placement dropped without warning, start with Why are my emails suddenly going to spam? For other platforms, see Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Marketo and Amazon SES.

When to get help

If authentication passes, you've cut back to engaged users and placement still isn't recovering, or Microsoft is blocking your IPs outright, an outside review of your volume history and audience rules usually finds the cause faster. Get in touch.

FAQ

Does Braze use shared IPs?

Braze's setup documentation describes dedicated IPs grouped into pools, not shared IPs. That means your reputation is the result of your own sending, which makes warming and volume consistency your responsibility.

Why does Microsoft keep blocking my Braze emails?

Usually because of complaints or traps from unengaged addresses at Outlook.com and Hotmail. Braze's docs note that Microsoft rarely unblocks senders with these problems on its free domains and suggest cutting that traffic to recently engaged users. See why Outlook is blocking your emails.

What happens when a Braze user marks an email as spam?

Braze stops sending them marketing email. Only messages set to send to all users, including unsubscribed users, still reach them.

Do I need to warm up again after moving to Braze?

Yes. New IPs have no history with mailbox providers, and Braze recommends a full warm-up for every newly assigned IP, even if your domain has a long sending history elsewhere.