Occasionally a customer tells us their texts are landing in spam, or sees it while testing.

It's rare, and there's are a few reasons for that:

• We test every phone number we provision for customers to confirm number health with real messages before you ever use it

• We track deliverability across the entire platform daily

• We work cases with carrier and aggregator compliance teams every day

• We pay close attention to how filtering behaves in practice, not just what the published rules say

• When something shifts, we usually see it in the data before customers feel it.

With that said, when this does come up, it's almost always one of three different things - with different causes and different fixes.

The key thing to understand: A message can be delivered perfectly and still land in a spam folder. Delivery and placement are separate steps handled by different systems, so your reports can look flawless while a recipient finds your text in their junk folder.

Which One Is Happening To You?

1. On-Device Filtering

The most common cause, and the one most often mistaken for a "spam" problem.

The message arrives successfully; the phone decides where to file it. Nothing looks wrong in your reporting because nothing is wrong on the sending side.

On iPhone:

iOS has a Screen Unknown Senders setting that routes the first message from an unsaved number into a separate list with no notification.

It's off by default, but industry research finds a significant amount of iPhone users turn it on, so assume a meaningful share of your audience is screening. It's self-correcting, though: once someone replies or saves you as a contact, you're in their main inbox for good.

On Android:

Google Messages has Spam Protection on by default. It runs machine learning on the phone to spot spam-like patterns and checks your links against Google's database of malicious URLs.

The biggest single factor is recipient spam reports. Once someone marks you as spam, their device keeps filtering you. This is why list quality and relevance matter more than any individual word choice.

What actually helps:

• Include an opt-out line - "Reply STOP to opt out" is a clear signal you're a real business and allows people to just opt out instead of hitting "report as spam"

• Give links context; a message ending in a bare URL matches the shape of a phishing text

• Don't stack urgency ("last chance" + "5 spots left" + a dollar figure) or blast identical copy

• Watch frequency - repeated messages in a short window earn spam reports fast

• Encourage replies & ask questions in your copy; a recipient who responds once has effectively whitelisted you

Our deliverability and content guide covers message copy in more depth. Most of it helps here too.

2. Why "Delivered" Is Lower Than "Sent"

This is the number that worries people most, and it's the one most often misread.

A gap between sent and delivered is normal, expected, and often has nothing to do with filtering.

Here's what's actually in that gap, roughly in order of size.

List quality: The most common reason a message isn't delivered is the number isn't real or reachable. For example, fake numbers typed into a form, landlines that can't receive texts, disconnected numbers.

How Roezan helps fix this: On every single send we check the carrier response, and when we identify a number that will never be deliverable (what we consider a hard bounce), we automatically opt it out for you. So every send you run is also cleaning your list. Much of that gap is us removing dead weight so you stop paying to text numbers that don't exist.

See more on how we validate numbers here.

Missing delivery receipts: Carriers aren't required to return a delivery confirmation, and some simply don't. Even when we don't receive one, the message often still got delivered in reality (we've confirmed this in our own testing, watching messages land on our own devices while no receipt ever came back). So some of your "not delivered" is really "not confirmed."

Delayed delivery receipts. Most come back within seconds, but we'll wait up to 4 hours to get one. If you check your numbers immediately after a send, you're looking at an incomplete picture.

Soft bounces: We sometimes get a generic failure response that we consider a soft bounce. We attribute this to carrier filtering but it's not always. It can mean the recipient's phone was off, out of coverage, out of prepaid credit, or genuinely filtered, and often the carrier will not give us a specific reason.

Across millions of messages, soft bounces typically runs at about 1% or less, which is completely normal and not worth worrying about. If it climbs meaningfully above that, or if it concentrates on one particular carrier, that's a real signal - and we'll investigate it.

3. Hard Spam Blocks (Aggregator Level)

Rare, but the one case that genuinely requires action.

How to spot it: It's total, not partial. Everything fails, to everyone, starting abruptly. If you're seeing a percentage of failures, this isn't you.

The usual trigger is a specific link or domain getting flagged.

These don't clear on their own, and we help handle them with you. We monitor for blocks across the platform and work directly with the upstream provider to get them lifted or to put a remediation plan in place. You don't need to chase it, but do tell us if you see a sudden total stop, since a heads-up helps us move faster.

Important Note: SMS Doesn't Work Like Phone Calls

Much of the worry about being "flagged as spam" comes from experience with phone calls, where the mechanics are genuinely different.

On voice calls, carriers work with analytics companies that score every phone number and pass that score to the recipient's carrier, which displays it as a visible label like "Spam Likely" or "Scam Likely" in the caller ID before the phone is even answered. The label is attached to your number, applied by the network, and shown to the recipient.

There is no equivalent in SMS. At least currently, no carrier attaches a visible spam warning to your number on a text message. Nothing tells the recipient "this sender is suspected spam" the way caller ID does.

Text filtering only ever works one of two ways: Either the message doesn't arrive at all, or it arrives and the recipient's own phone decides where to file it. So when someone says your text got "marked as spam," they're describing the on-device behavior in section 1 - a decision made by their phone, not a label a carrier stuck on your number.

Best Practices To Avoid Being Marked As Spam

The single best thing is to get people to message you.

Two-way conversation is the strongest signal of a legitimate, wanted sender. On-device filters, carriers, and recipients all read it the same way. Once someone has replied to you, filtering largely stops being a concern for that person.

Ways to generate inbound messages:

• Add a click-to-text link or button to your site - see Floating "Text Us" SMS Button / Widget

• Use a QR code that opens a pre-filled text. Works well on printed material, slides, and event signage

• Just ask. Inviting a reply in your first message works better than most people expect

Other things worth doing:

• Always get explicit opt-in. Texting people who didn't clearly agree to hear from you is the fastest way to collect spam reports, and reports are the most damaging signal there is. See Compliance & Best Practices

• Share your contact card (.vcf). When someone saves you to their contacts you're no longer an unknown sender, which is exactly the condition that triggers iPhone's screening and weighs into Android's filtering. Worth doing regardless

• Keep your list clean at the source. We remove undeliverable numbers automatically, but fewer fake numbers entering your forms means a healthier list overall

Should I just get a new number?

Usually not, and it could make things worse.

If the problem is on-device filtering or content, a new number changes nothing - the content follows you. And a brand-new number has no sending history, so filtering systems treat it more cautiously, not less. If your current number is healthy, and we can check that directly, replacing it throws away real reputation you've already earned.

There are cases where a new number is the right call, and we'll tell you plainly if yours is one. If you'd like one anyway, just ask.

Coming Soon: RCS / Verified Sending

We'll be rolling out RCS Business Messaging, which replaces the anonymous ten-digit number with a verified sender profile - your business name, your logo, and a "Verified" checkmark in the recipient's messaging app. Let us know if you'd like to hear when it's ready.

Still Seeing Issues?

Send us:

• A screenshot showing where it landed, plus the device and messaging app

• Roughly when it arrived

• Whether it's every message or specific ones

• Whether it's recent or has always happened

We'll pull your delivery data and tell you exactly which of the situations above you're in.