Taking on the Spam Filters: 750 Spam Words to avoid

The spam folder is every email marketer’s greatest nightmare. One of the handiest skills you need to learn to avoid landing in the spam folder is to write better emails.

Spam folders are good things to have in general – they protect our inboxes from all the junk emails that fly around. The problem is, spam filters don’t always get it right. Sometimes a perfectly legitimate email can end up in the spam folder for no obvious reason.

When this happens, it can be quite frustrating and as email marketers, it’s up to us to ensure that our email campaigns are free from content that could be flagged up as spam. Picking the right words is crucial for this.

Quick links to navigate this article:

• The ultimate list of spam words list to avoid
• 10 tips to avoid landing your emails into spam
• Test your emails using our Spam Words Checker

What are spam trigger words?

Spam trigger are words or expressions that email service providers (such as Gmail or Outlook) see as red flags. Most spam keywords fall into one of these 5 main types of spam words:

• Urgency 🚨 Words that pressure your recipients, such as Urgent or Before it’s too late
• Shady 🔞 Unethical or legally questionable words, such as drug-related keywords
• Overpromise 🤩 Exaggerated claims such as 100% free or the best
• Money 💰 All things related to money or offers in general, such as $$$ or Earn cash
• Unnatural 💬 Words or phrases that don’t feel natural such as Dear friend or that are difficult to understand, such as: Multi-level marketing

List of +750 spam words to avoid

We’ve compiled the most comprehensive list of spam words to avoid to ensure your emails steer clear of the spam filters. Browse the list below or access the Google Sheets version.

If you need this list, we’ve made a spreadsheet version available in this Google Sheets entitled “Ultimate List of +750 Email Spam Trigger Words”. It’s totally free to download.

Why are my emails going to spam in Gmail?

Email service providers (ESP) today use more and more intelligent technology for their spam filters, which are getting better at letting the right emails through and sending the wrong ones to the spam folder. Google spam filters and others ESP’ filters no longer just look at a few common spam words in your emails. They’ll also pick up on a host of other classic spam red flags that can suggest unsolicited content.

For example, let’s say you want to promote a special promotion for Black Friday. Using the word “offer” would be considered legit depending on the time of the year and the way your email is written.

On the other hand, if you stuff your email with a lot of these spam words, the bells will start ringing in spam word checker software and your content will get diverted to the spam folder.

If you’ve ever wondered “why are my emails going to spam in Gmail”, chances are it’s because of these email spam words that get picked up on by spam filters but also other due to other spam factors. In the next section, we’ll give you tips on how you can avoid the spam folder.

10 tips to avoid landing your emails into spam

1. Keep your subject line short. Most of the time we overlook the subject line and only consider it after writing our email content. But the truth is, we should do the exact opposite. The subject line accounts for a great part of your email campaign’s success. The subject line should be free of spam words, short, yet informational. Think of subject lines even before writing your email and AB test them by sending different lines to different samples of your recipients.

2. Keep your email content short. In the same way, your email content should be as concise as possible. Google and other anti-spam filters will look for unnatural emails. When writing an email to someone you know, it gets to the point so try applying the same philosophy to your email campaigns; even if you want to say a lot of things, the shorter the better.

3. Avoid using capital letters. Having your email subject line or entire sections of your email in ALL CAPS is a surefire sign of spam content, which will always get picked up on by spam filters. It’s always better to play things safe and write naturally, rather than using big letters to grab attention.

4. Avoid exclamation marks! It’s best practice to avoid using exclamation marks in both your subject line and content. Using too many exclamation marks is a sure way to end up in your recipients spam folder.

5. Avoid using colorful fonts. It can be tempting to use different color fonts to bring out certain key points in your email, but unfortunately, this is a classic example of what not to include in your email. Red, blue and any other colors are a no-go, as is using bigger fonts.

6. Include an unsubscribe option. One very quick way of giving your emails a better chance of getting through to an inbox is to add an unsubscribe button at the end of your email. This suggests that your intentions as a sender are good and your marketing model is fair and transparent.

7. Use links carefully. Spam emails are often trying to get you to click through to dodgy websites with rampant viruses and scams to take advantage of you. Many of these links are fed into spam filters – which then spot them in spam emails and send them to the junk.

8. Make sure your email structure is clean. Emails are built on HTML and a poorly constructed bit of HTML coding is a big no-no for spam filters. That can happen when you copy-paste a template from Google Docs to Gmail for example or when you find a HTML template on the internet. Ensuring your HTML coding is secure and not broken is a must for getting your emails safely into your recipients’ inboxes. Our recommendation is to keep emails as simple as you can. Using plain text is a best practice and always write your emails as if you were writing to a friend or colleagues.

9. Check your spelling and grammar. A poorly written email is often a ref flag for anti-spam filters.

10. Make sure your emails are authenticated. To make your email more secure and protect your domain, authentifying your emails is an additional way to avoid the spam folder. Read Google’s guide on how to set up your DKIM, SPF and DMARC, which are the standard authentications for emails. Without that, messages sent from your domain are more likely to be marked as spam by receiving mail servers.

Bonus: Warm up your email account. Even if your domain and inbox are set up perfectly, a mail server can still misclassify your outreach efforts. Over time these misclassifications will damage your domain reputation as well as the overall health of your inbox, which is why an email warming tool can be helpful to improve your email outreach campaigns. By using an email warming up service, your account will automatically engage with other users and participate in positive inbox behavior. This will continuously improve the reputation and deliverability of your inbox, ultimately keeping your important messages out of spam folders.

Go further by reading our best practices before sending a mail merge with Gmail.

How can I check if my emails are spam?

If you’ve used our spam words list above to remove spam words in email content you’re sending, then you’re already on your way to getting past the spam filters - but there is a way you can check your emails to be certain they’ll succeed before you send them out.

We have built a free Spam Words Checker to quickly highlight words that could be considered spam in your email. Also, there are a number of handy online tools that will check your email to see if they look a little too much like spam. Two of the best on the market are mail-tester and Postmark.

Simply paste your email content or send an email to a set address with either of these tools. They’ll give your email a score which you can use to measure just how spammy your email might look to a filter. Remember that using one or two of these words in context is fine, but stuffing your emails with them is when things can get problematic.