Can custom email headers trigger spam filters?

Question

We do a lot of mailing and we use Sendgrid to give it unique arguments and categories. But for storage, archiving, filtering and search capabilities, I would like to give them some other custom headers too, something like a json format of this array

array('user' => 300, 'item' => 8842, 'country' => 'Croatia');

Now, is it possible for such custom headers to hurt the passthrough rate of our emails? In other words, is there a chance of our emails triggering spam filters due to having such custom headers?

Answer 1

The convention for user defined headers is to prefix them with an X-. For example

X-my-custom-header: foo

This has been a part of the email spec for a long time (see: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc822) and shouldn't ever hurt your deliverability.

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Also, related question: Custom header mail() and spam score