Why automation emails inbox but campaigns may not

A common and confusing observation: your automation emails reach the inbox, but your campaign emails land in Promotions or Spam — from the same MailMonk account. This is expected behaviour, not a bug. They travel over completely different paths.

Two different sending paths

Automations (board automations and item-view sends) go out through your own connected Gmail / Google Workspace / Microsoft 365 account via OAuth:

• They send from Google’s or Microsoft’s mail servers, which have enormous, long-established reputation.
• Each send looks transactional and 1:1 — even a 500-item status-change run fires as individual, personal-looking messages.

Campaigns go out through MailMonk’s bulk sending service (shared, reputable IPs purpose-built for marketing email):

• This is a new sending path for your domain, so it has to build its own reputation.
• The mail is bulk and promotional by nature, which filters treat differently from 1:1 mail.

Why reputation doesn’t carry over

Reputation is tied to the specific sending path and domain — it is not transferable. The trust your Gmail account has built over years doesn’t move to the bulk campaign path. So a brand-new campaign path starts cold even though your automations have been inboxing for ages.

The takeaway

Different infrastructure + different mail nature + non-transferable reputation = different placement. It’s the same reason a personal email always inboxes while a newsletter from a new domain might not.

The fix is the same as for any new domain: warm up gradually with engaged recipients, keep your list clean, and write good content. See Why new sending domains warm up.