Malformed HTML in emails negatively impacts deliverability and triggers spam filters. The severity depends on sender reputation and mailbox provider; established senders may have more leeway. Common errors include missing alt text, unclosed tags, and incorrect doctype declarations, all contributing to higher spam scores. While content is becoming relatively less important to spam algorithms, user engagement underscores the importance of well-crafted, accessible content. AI spam filters analyze HTML code quality and can penalize emails with misspelled tags and other bad signals. Ensuring clean, valid, and semantically correct HTML, along with following best practices like using inline CSS and avoiding deprecated tags, is crucial for improving inbox placement, rendering consistency, accessibility and overall user experience across various email clients and devices.
14 marketer opinions
Malformed HTML in emails can negatively impact deliverability and trigger spam filters, although the extent of the impact depends on sender reputation and mailbox provider. Common HTML errors, such as missing alt text, unclosed tags, and incorrect doctype declarations, contribute to higher spam scores. While content is becoming less relevant in spam filtering algorithms, user engagement ironically increases the importance of content to deliverability. AI spam filters consider various factors, including HTML code quality, and misspelled tags combined with other bad signals can harm deliverability. Ensuring clean and valid HTML, validating code, using proper declarations, and following email coding best practices improves inbox placement and user experience.
Marketer view
Email marketer from Email Geeks suggests that content, including HTML, is becoming less relevant to spam filters than it was in the past, as filters now focus more on user preferences and engagement, ironically this means that content is more important to deliverability.
1 Jan 2022 - Email Geeks
Marketer view
Email marketer from Email Geeks notes that common HTML errors in emails include missing alt text, unclosed tags, missing title tags, and missing `<!DOCTYPE html>`, and while fixing these takes minutes, the impact is marginal but can make a difference.
31 Jan 2024 - Email Geeks
2 expert opinions
Malformed HTML negatively impacts email deliverability by signaling spam filters. Clean, valid HTML code is crucial for improving inbox placement. Proper HTML structure and avoiding deprecated tags are important to prevent inconsistent display and reduce the risk of being flagged as spam.
Expert view
Expert from Word to the Wise (Laura Atkins) details that proper HTML structure and avoiding deprecated tags are important for deliverability, and not using these can lead to inconsistent display and can raise flags for spam filters.
8 Jul 2023 - Word to the Wise
Expert view
Expert from Spam Resource explains that malformed HTML can negatively impact email deliverability as it can be a signal for spam filters. They advise ensuring clean and valid HTML code to improve inbox placement.
5 Mar 2025 - Spam Resource
4 technical articles
Malformed or poorly coded HTML in emails increases the likelihood of being flagged as spam or junk by email clients like Outlook. Valid, semantic HTML ensures proper rendering and improves deliverability by avoiding spam triggers. Best practices, such as using inline CSS and avoiding deprecated tags, are recommended to ensure optimal rendering, accessibility, and deliverability across different platforms, including iOS.
Technical article
Documentation from Apple details that malformed or invalid HTML can create accessibility issues for users on iOS devices; and that to ensure readability of your mail you should use valid HTML.
1 Jun 2025 - Apple
Technical article
Documentation from Microsoft Support explains that malformed HTML in emails can cause Outlook to flag the message as junk. They suggest ensuring that HTML is properly formatted and complies with web standards to reduce the likelihood of emails being filtered into the junk folder.
28 Oct 2022 - Microsoft Support
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