How to Enhance Your Web Push Notifications and Avoid Spam Filters

In the journey of developing a social media platform with Next.js, ensuring effective user engagement through real-time notifications is crucial. While implementing push notifications can significantly boost user interaction, it can sometimes come with challenges—most notably, notifications ending up as spam or not appearing as intended.

The Challenge: Notifications Flagged as Spam

Having successfully integrated and tested a push notification system using the Ably service, I faced an unexpected hurdle: notifications were consistently being marked as spam by browsers or devices. Despite including essential parameters such as icon, badge, time-to-live (TTL), tag, collapse key, and setting options like renotify:true and silent:false, the notifications still failed to reach users as desired.

Goals for Your Push Notification System

To ensure your notifications are effective and user-friendly, consider the following objectives:

• Engage Users Clearly: Notifications should awaken the device and prompt user interaction.
• Visibility in Notification Bar: They should appear prominently in the device’s notification area.
• Brand Consistency: Display your application’s logo instead of generic icons like Chrome’s.
• Smart Grouping: Notifications with similar content or purpose should combine into a single message to prevent clutter.
• Interactive Options: Enable actions like ‘Like’ or ‘Reply’ directly from the notification.

Strategies to Improve Deliverability and Appearance

1. Review Browser and Platform Policies
   Browsers often flag notifications as spam based on their content and delivery patterns. Make sure your messages are relevant, not overly frequent, and personalized when possible. Also, verify that your site passes all necessary permissions and policies for push notifications.

2. Optimize Notification Payloads
   Ensure your notification payloads are correctly structured and include necessary fields such as:

3. Proper icon URLs
4. Badge images
5. An appropriate TTL value

6. Correct tag and collapseKey attributes for grouping

7. Use Appropriate Options for User Engagement
   Features like renotify:true are useful, but browsers might interpret frequent notifications as spam. Balance their usage accordingly.

8. Display Your App Logo
   To show your app’s logo rather than default icons, specify your icon URL in the notification payload and ensure it’s accessible over HTTPS.

9. Implement Notification Actions
   Many browsers support action buttons within notifications. To incorporate actions like ‘Like’ or ‘Reply’: