IS THIS HAPPENING TO YOU?

The first sign something is going wrong is usually when a friend, family member or business colleague tells you they didn’t receive an expected email. They may be experienced email users and check the spam folder, whereupon they find the “missing” email and take the trouble to contact you to explain the situation. So what do you do?

DEFINITIONS

The person sending an email is called the SENDER

The person receiving an email is the RECIPIENT

The server sending an email has an address called the IP ADDRESS. It looks like this :- 123.456.786.255

PLAIN TEXT emails are those which have no pictures, attachments or fancy formatting. On all email apps there is a facility for creating emails in plain text.

JUNK FOLDER or SPAM FOLDER This folder is where all the spam and junk goes.

SPAM SCORE. Many Email Providers use a cumulative scoring system whereby infrigments get penalty points which are then summed and the score used to deny or allow emails. 

COMMON REASONS WHY EMAIL GOES TO SPAM

EMAIL SIGNATURES
Many if not most e-commerce sites have a clause in every email, especially their order confirmation emails, or on their FAQ page, which tells customers to add their email address to their “Friends List”, also known as a whitelist. Its also useful to add something to the effect “If you dont receive confirmation within 15 minutes of ordering, please check your JUNK or SPAM folder for our email.

BLOCK CAPS
Do not use blocks of capital (upper case) letters, especially in the TITLE and your NAME of your emails
e.g.
DO NOT USE CAPITAL LETTERS
or MR MILLER : SALES@CALCOUK.COM

GAPPY TEXT
Some marketeers who send spam for a living try to trick spam filters by using gaps between letters or replacing letter “O” with a zero. G A P P Y T E X T or substitution text “My nam3 is R0nn1” This is easily detected and not allowed.

ATTACHMENTS
All hosting companies or email providers have limits on the size of attachment you can send. If the attachment is too large the email will be rejected or the attachment stripped out.

FORBIDDEN ATTACHMENT TYPES
Email providers may also specifiy what attachment TYPES they allow. For example Microsoft Office docs may be forbidden. In such case you should re-name the document to someting like mynewsletter.abc and nform the recipient that once downloaded, it has to be renamed back to the original mynewsletter.docx

SETTING OF SPAM FILTERS
Most email uses will have a setting in their email that deals with SPAM and the level of “severity” with which their system deals with spam. While it is difficult to ask someone to whom you are sending email, particularly strangers, if they wouldn’t mind changing their spam detection settings, it is useful to know that strict spam rules can prevent them from receiving your, and other people’s email. Its particularly useful to know this if you are worried you are missing important emails.

TRYING WEBMAIL
If your email isnt getting to the “Recipient”, try using webmail. Sometimes it works and it will also reveal clues as to why normal email isnt working.

BULK EMAIL & MARKETING

You should always use a third party company for sending bulk email (more than two addresses). This protects your valuable email address from being BLACKLISTED.We suggest using MailChimp.com as they allow up to 2000 recipients free of charge.

LINKS IN AN EMAIL
Try not to include more than one link in her emails. Emails containing lots of links are usually regarded as spam.

UNSUBSCRIBE
Some email providers now scan for an unsubscribe link. You should try to have one of these in every email you send. If you want to try a “dummy” unsubscribe add a link with the following as the link reference – that’s the bit where you put the link “target” and without quotes:- “mailto:me@validemailaddress.com?subject=unsubscribe”

PREVIOUS EMAIL(S)
Do not include multiple parts of previous emails, i.e. when you REPLY to an email, the previous email is usually included below. Try to have only ONE of these “reply inclusions” or you are asking for trouble.

IMAGES IN EMAILS
Make sure there are at least a hundred words to every image and try not to have multiple images in your email.

BLACKLIST
Make sure you are not on a Blacklist and find out why if you are. We use MX Toolbox which is here:- https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx

*You can get your mailserver’s IP Address here:-
https://mxtoolbox.com/MXLookup.aspx

DE-LISTING FROM BLACKLIST
If you find your email address on a Blacklist and you want to get off that list, look for the company’s DE-LISTING page. Go to Google and type in the name of the SPAM LIST COMPANY followed by the word DELIST. You can then submit your email address or IP Address* to request de-listing.

ANTI SPAM SOFTWARE
There are multiple softwares available for filtering spam but one of  the most common is Spam Assassin (SA). If your email isnt getting to the Recipient,  make sure SA or other software isn’t installed on the computers you are sending and if it is, try sending your email in Plain Text OR make sure all the Recipient’s SA Rules are followed.

MICROSOFT
We are seeing a VERY high rate of rejection from Microsoft email addresses such as anything@outlook.com, anything@hotmail.com and  anything@a_customer_address_thats_registered_with_Office_365.com  We think Microsoft REQUIRE white-listing, SPF and/or DKIM

DMARC is the combined protocols of SPF and DKIM.

SPF is Sender Framework Policy. Its a piece of code that lives in the DNS of your domains “zone file” that tells anyone who asks, where egitimate email should come from. If you want SPF records added to your domain – just ask and we will do it for you.

DKIM is DomainKeys Identified Mail  With DKIM when you send an email , it is signed with a private domain key then it’s validated at the mail hosting datacentre’s  mail server (or ISP) with a public key written to the DNS. DKIM is a monthly paid service designed for businesses and isn’t free or cheap.

Other companies like BT monitor all incoming emails for spam. Emails to multiple BT addresses can trigger the spam filter. In the UK its likely that in a list of 50 recipients, quite a few will be going to members of BT’s email service.