TECHHAMMER INC.

The road to e-mail inboxes is fraught with perils of all kinds, even for the most upstanding marketers. Blacklists, white lists, ISP relations, list hygiene, even e-mail content and design can influence whether your message is delivered -- or not. As deliverability hinges on both technical and marketing know-how, sometimes you may need professional help to send your monthly newsletters out.

Why does my mail get delivered marked as Spam?
Spam is a real problem. With some people getting literally hundreds of unwanted messages per day a lot of internet service providers, as well as some individuals, are taking drastic steps to reduce the amount of junk mail in their inboxes.

The problem with many of these anti-spam measures is that they can block legitimate email as well. Assuming that your email to other places is working, it's quite possible that that's what you're seeing.

Legitimate email typically gets erroneously blocked for a couple of reasons: either the receiving system thinks your email looks too much like spam, or the receiving system thinks that you're sending it from an address that is or has been accused of being a spammer. Note that we said "thinks" - and it's the mistakes associated with that thinking that cause legitimate email to be mistaken for spam.

The other common problem is email being blocked because it came from an IP address that's been identified as somehow being related to spammers. If you're not getting your email bounced back to you with some indication, this is both harder to detect, and harder to resolve.

Some general guidelines for your email or newsletters:

• Do not "shout" in your email campaigns by using caps lock
• Avoid using multiple exclamation marks
• Don't use exclamation or question marks in the header
• Do not embed scripts in your email
• Use valid HTML
• Use a proper title tag - not the default used by your web page editor
• Don't use light colored fonts on a light background or dark font color on a dark background.
• Definitely do not state "this is not spam". It's a line that spammers use.
• Use terms like "free", "limited offer", "bonus", "buy now" and related terms sparingly.
• In relation to the above; don't try strategies like F R E E or F*ree to get around the filters, they can detect obfuscation
• Using an image to display poison word text may work, but bear in mind that an email containing only images will also throw up a red flag.
• Don't add in a stack of blank lines
• Don't have an @something-offers from address
• Try not to use the word "buy" in subject lines
• Don't use large fonts
• The use of "dear" or "dear friend" in a subject line while increase your spam score
• The word "guarantee" should be used sparingly
• Image only emails are more likely to trigger a score

The best way to ensure your email will pass a filter test is to run your email through a testing application first.

Whether you need help with your actual email delivery or would like some consulting to "clean" your email delivery procedures yourself, let Techhammer assist you.