For Brevo users and every email marketer, these metrics are more than performance numbers: they represent potential revenue, customer engagement, and your domain’s long-term standing with inbox providers. According to Validity’s 2025 Email Deliverability Benchmark Report<\/a>, the global inbox placement rate sits at 83.5%, meaning roughly one in six marketing emails never reaches the inbox at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Deliverability problems don’t have a single cause. They stem from a mix of technical gaps, list hygiene failures, content issues, and reputation damage. Here are the four areas most likely to hurt your Brevo inbox placement:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Server reliability and uptime.<\/strong> Server performance determines whether your emails are sent promptly and consistently. Brevo maintains high uptime as a major ESP, but occasional API errors, integration misconfigurations, or transient issues on your end can result in failed transmissions or improperly formatted emails that servers reject.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Authentication gaps.<\/strong> This is the most critical technical factor in 2024 and beyond. Google’s bulk sender guidelines<\/a> (enforced since February 2024, with stricter enforcement rolling out from November 2025) now require all senders of 5,000+ daily emails to implement DKIM, SPF, and DMARC. Missing any of these causes your emails to fail authentication checks and land in spam or get rejected outright.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Important for Brevo users:<\/strong> Brevo manages SPF at the envelope-sender level using its own servers, so you do not need to manually configure an SPF record for Brevo. What you do need to configure is DKIM, which you can set up directly in your Brevo dashboard under Senders, Domains, and Dedicated IPs. Once DKIM is in place, add a DMARC record aligned to your DKIM domain. DKIM authentication is the recommended alignment path<\/a> because it survives email forwarding in a way that SPF alignment does not. See the Brevo DKIM and DMARC setup guide<\/a> for step-by-step instructions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not sure your domain authentication is correctly set up? Run a free Email Deliverability Test<\/a> to check your DKIM, DMARC, and inbox placement instantly.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Poor list hygiene and invalid addresses.<\/strong> Sending to outdated or incorrect email addresses is a direct path to high bounce rates. When your hard bounce rate rises, inbox providers flag your domain as a problematic sender. Email list scrubbing tools<\/a> help you identify and remove invalid addresses before they damage your reputation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Low engagement signals.<\/strong> Gmail and Outlook increasingly use engagement data to route email: if your recipients never open or click your messages, providers treat your domain as a low-priority sender and push your emails toward spam. Keeping only engaged subscribers and segmenting inactive contacts is not just good practice, it is now a technical requirement for inbox placement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Spam trigger words and formatting.<\/strong> Spam filters analyze email content, subject lines, and HTML structure. Emails that use high-risk phrases, broken HTML, excessive image-to-text imbalance, or missing plain-text versions are more likely to be filtered. Use Warmy’s free Email Template Checker<\/a> to scan your email content for spam triggers before you hit send.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lack of personalization.<\/strong> Generic mass emails with no relevance to the recipient are more likely to be marked as spam by users, which directly raises your complaint rate. A complaint rate above 0.1% starts to hurt your deliverability; above 0.3%, Google begins rejecting your mail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Blacklisting.<\/strong> Being added to a spam blacklist is one of the most severe outcomes of poor sending practices. It can result from high complaint rates, sudden send volume spikes, or consistent sending to invalid addresses. Recovery requires fixing the root cause and submitting a removal request to each blacklist. See the guide on how to remove an IP from a blacklist<\/a> for the exact process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Historical reputation issues.<\/strong> Prior deliverability incidents, whether from your domain’s history or from Brevo’s shared IP pools, leave a lasting signal with inbox providers. Brevo’s shared IPs mean your reputation is partially tied to other senders on the same infrastructure. If you need full reputation isolation, Brevo’s Professional plan offers a dedicated IP as a paid add-on.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhy Your Brevo Emails Are Going to Spam: 4 Root Causes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
1. Technical Issues<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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![\"Email](\"https:\/\/www.warmy.io\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Deliverability-test-1024x623.png\" "\\"\\"")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n2. Email List Problems<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
3. Content Issues<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"Template](\"https:\/\/www.warmy.io\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Template-Checker-1024x768.webp\" "\\"\\"")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n4. Reputation Damage<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Shared IP vs. Dedicated IP: Deliverability Impact<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"DMARK](\"https:\/\/www.warmy.io\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/DMARK-generator-1024x727.png\" "\\"\\"")
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