Best Practices for Email Deliverability:

The following is a list of best practices for increasing the deliverability of your email messages. Deliverability means that your legitimate email gets to the inbox of the recipient, and is not stuck in spam filters.

• Never buy a list of email addresses - That is the best way to get yourself blacklisted for lots of domains, and guarantee that your email will not be delivered.
• Send from a clean IP - If your sending mail from an IP that has sent spam email in the past, chances are your mail will be blocked. Also never use a SMTP server on a dynamic IP address, or on a dail-up, dsl, or cable modem.
• Remove bounced emails from your list - use some software to remove bad email addresses. Domain’s such as AOL will block you if you try to send to too many non-existent addresses. You should immediately remove all hard bounces.
• Use the same from address for all email - If a recipient is using a challenge response system they will typically add your newsletter address to their whitelist (a list of allowed email addresses) the first time you send them an email. If you send from a different email address every time the recipient may not keep adding your address to their whitelist.
• Setup SPF records in your DNS - Sender Policy Framework, or SPF are very simple records that you add to your DNS records. They identify which IP addresses may send email on behalf of your domain, many spam filters will give you positive points if you have these setup correctly. By creating an SPF record your also allowing Microsoft Sender-ID to be used.
• Validate HTML before sending - Invalid HTML or poorly formatted HTML can have negative effects on deliverability.
• Don’t use too much HTML - Some spam filters will give you a negative rating if the ratio of content to HTML markup is too small. Recommended file sizes not to exceed 50-75 kilobytes.
• Don’t link to too many different domains - Spammers often use several different domain names for each product they are pushing.
• Avoid punctuation in the subject line - Especially exclamation and question marks.
• Never use all caps - Besides being annoying many spam filters will pick flag this as spam.
• Don’t use currency signs (eg $) in subject
• Don’t use a large font size
• Don’t address your recipient with the word Dear - Especially not Dear Friend!
• Personalize content - If you give the user personalized content it is more likely to pass through their personal spam filters. For instance if my email address is pete@example.com and you use my last name, chances are I gave you my last name, and it is a valid email.
• Get Whitelisted - Some ISP’s such as AOL have whitelists that you may be able to get added to. Additionally you can pay to get added to some, such as BondedSender.
• Lowercase From address - make sure your from address is lower case
• Don’t have numbers in your from address
• Use a name in the From header - don’t just use your email address, also include a name. A large percentage of spam simply uses an email address in the from header.
• Don’t put the recipient’s name in the subject
• Include To, Subject, Date, Message-ID, headers
• Avoid words that commonly appear in spam – you should avoid the following words in your email, and especially in the subject such as:
  • enlarge
  • click here
  • big bucks
  • long distance
  • dear
  • loan
  • free
  • offer
  • money back
  • targeted
  • incredible
  • spam
  • drug related words - viagra, etc.
  • sex/porn related words

Notes from our President, Uncategorized