How do I stop my emails being marked as spam?

As you probably know I am in charge of answering support request here at Maxprog. Quite often I am being asked about email delivery issues, specially problems regarding apparently legitimate messages being flagged and blocked by spam filtering software. This particular issue is quite frustrating because most of the time you have no idea where the problem come from. It is even more frustrating for me when people think the culprit is MaxBulk Mailer, maxprog bulk mailer software. There is no relation actually, MaxBulk Mailer is an email client like any other.

In this post I will try to gather all my knowledge about how to prevent running into this kind of problem. Let's see the typical story:

You composed your newsletter as usual, you selected your subscriber list and then sent the message with a copy to yourself. You later found out that your copy never arrived and then, asking to a few subscribers it turns out some of them did not receive anything either.

Does this story looks familiar to you?

A message wrongly flagged as spam is called a false positive. A spam filter will check your message and will give it a score. If you reach a given score your message is flagged. Basically the spam filter will check whether:

• Your message looks like spam


• Your mail server is blacklisted


• Your recipient list contains lots of dead addresses


• Your recipient list contains spam traps


• You are sending to too many recipients

Let's go through this list...

Your message looks like spam

When you write a message try to be as personal as possible. Think like if you were sending the message to one person only. It is easy to do, just select one of your best known customer and write the message with him/her in mind. Finally add tags to the message to insert personal info, a personal greeting for example. It is explained in detail here: How to make your email's look more personal. Do not use spam-like words. The list is huge but just have a quick look in order to get the picture. A List of Common Spam Words, The Ultimate List of Email SPAM Trigger Words.

Your mail server is blacklisted

If you mail server is blacklisted there are chances your message will never go through. How do you find out? Easy, MXtoolbox. That service will check your mail server domain or IP address with about 100 black lists. Here you should get green OK icons on all lines. You should work on that overwise. Very seriously! All black list systems offer a way to get delisted.

Your recipient list contains lots of dead addresses

How old is your list? Where or how did you get it? Are you maintaining it regularly? Did you know that big mail servers like Gmail may flag a message sent to their server after reaching a given error threshold? That means that if your list has what Gmail considers too much dead/invalid addresses, the whole message will be flagged. You should check your list and remove bounces from it! Bounces are those delivery error emails you get in your inbox, don't ignore them! Remove the invalid emails addresses from list right away. One solution is to verify the list with eMail Verifier at least once and then process bounces with eMail Bounce Handler as explained here.

Your recipient list contains spam traps

Spammers usually collect email addresses by using automated e-mail address harvester software. Those tools build lists out of web sites. Spam traps are specific email addresses placed on purpose so any e-mail messages sent to such type of address are immediately flagged and considered as spam. Finally, an anti-spam system may instantly block your whole message as soon as a spamtrap is found. Nobody else will get it!... So, never harvest email addresses from the web and never purchase lists. Create your own lists!

You are sending too much messages at once

There are systems, like Gmail that may flag your message because you have reached a given delivery threshold. That means you have sent too many messages to that particular server. The solution is quite easy, send your message at a slower pace. Its is explained here in detail: Sending a message through a server with a daily or an hourly delivery limit.

Now I would like to talk about a great service I am sending all my customers to. It is called Mail Tester. This free service is literally for testing the 'spammyness' of your emails. You just need to send your message to an email address they will give you. A few seconds later you will get a score and a detailed report of what is ok and what is wrong. That simple. You even get some directions to fix the problems. The best here is to try to get a score of 10/10. There are chances you will have to sign your messages with DKIM. Hopefully last versions of MaxBulk Mailer support DKIM. It is explained here: How to use DKIM with MaxBulk Mailer.

And remember to add an unsubscribe link to your messages. You can do that by installing our Mailing List Manager (MLM) on your web site. You can use MLM only to handle unsubscribes for local lists and ignore all the other features. When using MLM MaxBulk Mailer will add unsubscribe headers that Gmail will display automatically.

I hope you likes this post. I welcome your comments.

More information on Spam:
- Email Spam
- The Definition of Spam
- How to create and publish your first newsletter

—
Stan Busk - Software Engineer
at www.maxprog.com