Somebody is right now rewriting "free" as "complimentary" in a cold email that is going to a scraped
list. That edit will not help. The list is the problem, and no amount of vocabulary laundering
touches it.
The "spam words to avoid" posts that keep circulating are roughly a decade out of date. They persist
because they are easy to publish, not because they are accurate. Modern filters are statistical and
contextual, and they are mostly not reading your adjectives.
Here is what actually decides whether your mail lands, in rough order of impact. We run our own sending
stack, so this ordering comes from watching it, including from the parts that cost us deliverability
before we understood them.
1. What recipients do with your mail
This is by far the largest factor, and it dwarfs everything else on this page combined.
Filters are trained on behaviour. Deleting without opening, marking as spam, never replying. Those
signals are the model. Which leads to the conclusion most cold email advice avoids, because it
implies sending less:
Sending to fewer, better-targeted people improves deliverability more than any wording change ever
will. That is the whole game. Everything below is a rounding error next to it.
2. Authentication
SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Binary and unforgiving: they either pass or they do not, and if they do not, the
rest of your effort is irrelevant. This is a one-afternoon job you do once, properly, and then stop
thinking about.
3. Sending reputation
Your domain's and your IP's history. Built slowly, damaged quickly, and not transferable. This is why
"just buy a fresh domain" is a worse plan than it sounds: you are trading a damaged asset for one
with no history at all, and a brand-new domain sending cold volume is its own red flag.
4. List quality
Bounce rates, spam-trap hits, addresses that have been dead for years. A bought or scraped list is
made of exactly these, which is the real reason those lists do not work. Not the price, the damage.
5. The message itself
Real, and much smaller than the four above. Worth fixing, worth fixing last.
- Image-only emails. One big image with no meaningful text is a classic spam pattern. A cold email should be mostly text anyway.
- Too many links. One is ideal for a first contact, two is fine, five looks like a newsletter nobody subscribed to.
- Link shorteners. bit.ly and friends are heavily abused and some are blocklisted outright. Link to your own domain.
- Mismatched link text. Anchor text naming one domain while the href points somewhere else is a phishing pattern, and it gets treated as one.
- Attachments on first contact. Especially PDFs and anything zipped. Never.
- A broken or missing unsubscribe. Beyond being illegal, it converts people who would have quietly unsubscribed into people who click "report spam", and complaints are the metric that actually hurts you.
- ALL CAPS subjects, excessive punctuation, emoji pile-ups. Genuinely weighted, though less than folklore claims. They also just read badly.
The phrases that do still carry weight
Not because of the words, but because they correlate with actual scams:
- Guaranteed-money language: "make $5,000 a week", "risk free", "100% guaranteed"
- Manufactured urgency: "act now", "limited time", "expires today", especially in a subject line
- Pharmaceutical, adult, gambling and crypto-pump vocabulary
- "Dear Friend", "Dear Sir/Madam" and other mass-mail openers
- A fake
Re:orFwd:on a message that is neither
That last one deserves emphasis, because cheap cold-email courses actively teach it. Faking a prior
conversation is a lie, it is a CAN-SPAM violation where it misleads about the message, and it converts
into complaints at a high rate. It is the single worst piece of common advice in this field.
Measure placement instead of guessing
Word lists are guesswork. These are measurements.
Seed addresses. Keep your own accounts at Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo and include them in every send.
Which folder they land in is the only direct read on placement you get.
Google Postmaster Tools. Free, and it shows domain reputation, spam-complaint rate and
authentication pass rates for Gmail specifically. Real numbers rather than proxies.
A spam-checker tool, treated with suspicion. They score against generic heuristics: useful for
catching a broken unsubscribe or a missing header, useless as a verdict on whether you will be
delivered.
Per-provider open rates. If Gmail holds steady while Outlook collapses, that is a filtering
problem at one provider, and the aggregate number would have hidden it.
The one check that replaces the whole list
Before a send, one question: would this recipient plausibly be glad to receive this?
If the answer is no, nothing above saves it. Fix the targeting, not the wording.
And the order to spend effort in: send to people who want it, get authentication right once, keep the
list clean and suppress aggressively, and then tidy the structural things.
The full kit
This is the spam-trigger part of the Cold Email Deliverability Kit: the 25-point pre-send
checklist with the exact SPF, DKIM, DMARC and rDNS records to paste; the 21-day warm-up schedule in
day bands with specific volumes, the per-mailbox ceiling and the warning signs that mean stop; bounce
triage tables with the SMTP codes, including the quiet failures that mean you are already in trouble
with nothing showing up as a bounce; the recovery plan for when you are already in the spam folder,
in order, with realistic timelines and the point at which a domain is worth abandoning; seven
templates that read like a person wrote them; and the legal floor across CAN-SPAM, GDPR and CASL in
operator language.
Written by someone who built the sending infrastructure rather than someone who read about it.
Get the Cold Email Deliverability Kit ($29). PDF plus the
templates as plain text.
Top comments (0)