Troubleshooting Push Notifications: Ensuring They Don’t End Up in Spam

Building an effective push notification system is crucial for engaging users on your web application. Recently, I developed a push notification setup for a social media platform using Next.js, utilizing Ably’s Push Notification service due to Next.js’s incompatibility with WebSockets. While the implementation was successful and most notifications functioned as intended, I encountered a significant challenge: notifications were consistently flagged as spam.

The Challenge

Despite configuring key parameters—such as icon, badge, time-to-live (TTL), tag, collapse key, renotify, and silent settings—the notifications were still being treated as spam by browsers and devices. This situation undermines user engagement and defeats the purpose of timely alerts.

What I Want to Achieve

My goals for the push notifications are straightforward:

• Wake Up Devices: Ensure notifications reliably activate on users’ phones.
• Visibility: Display prominently in the notification bar.
• Branding: Show my app’s logo instead of generic icons or browser indicators.
• Grouping: Combine notifications with the same tag or collapse key to prevent clutter.

Additionally, I am exploring whether it’s possible to add interactive actions within web push notifications, such as “Like” or “Reply” buttons, to enhance user interaction directly from the notification panel.

Key Insights and Recommendations

To avoid your notifications being marked as spam, consider the following best practices:

1. Optimize Content Quality
2. Ensure your notification messages are relevant, personalized, and non-intrusive.

3. Avoid overly promotional or repetitive content that might trigger spam filters.

4. Authenticate Properly

5. Use proper VAPID (Voluntary Application Server Identification) keys for web push authentication.

6. Ensure your server correctly signs and encrypts notifications.

7. Adhere to Browser Guidelines

8. Follow each browser’s specific policies for push notifications.

9. Respect user preferences and avoid excessive frequency.

10. Configure Notification Payloads Carefully

11. Include appropriate icons, badge images, and app logos.
12. Use consistent tags and collapse keys to group related notifications.

13. Set renotify to true only when necessary.

14. User Engagement and Consent

15. Obtain clear user permission before sending notifications.

16. Allow users to customize notification preferences.

17. Implement Notification Actions

18. Using the Notification API, define action buttons like “Reply” or “Like” via the