Tips to Avoid Legitimate E-mail from Landing in Spam Folder

Comply with the CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business

1. Don’t use false or misleading header information.

2. Don’t use deceptive subject lines.

3. Identify the message as an ad.

4. Tell recipients where you’re located.

5. Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you.

6. Honor opt-out requests promptly.

7. Monitor what others are doing on your behalf.

This law exists to protect consumers from unsolicited commercial e-mail, so it does not apply to personal or triggered e-mail.  More detailed information can be found at the CAN-SPAM Act web page.

Optimize E-mail Content

1. When sending HTML e-mail, include a text version (using the same copy).

2. Limit the number of links.

3. Compress image size with little to no loss in quality by using any number of online or desktop image optimization tools.

4. Add at least two lines of text for every image (do NOT send image-only e-mail messages).

5. Use our Newsletter Broadcast tool to create both HTML and text content.

Avoid Words/Phrases that Trigger Spam and Phishing Filters

1. No list of spam trigger words/phrases/patterns is complete, but a useful one from the SpamAssassin Project can be found here.

2. Phishing is the illegal act of impersonating a business solely for the purpose of extracting personal or sensitive information from unsuspecting e-mail recipients.  Legitimate businesses never ask for such information in an e-mail.  Examples of phishing can be found here.

Use GigaMail to Send Large Attachments and Avoid Sending Executable Files

1. An e-mail with a large attachment is often flagged as spam or virus. Even if it is not flagged, large attachments often exceed the maximum e-mail size permitted by some ISPs and e-mail service providers. Avoid the problem entirely by using our GigaMail tool, which permits you to send large files to anyone.

2. Unless the recipient is expecting it, avoid sending executable files (.exe, .zip, .dmg, .swf, etc.) as attachment.  It has a high likelihood of triggering spam- or virus-protection.

Use Permission-Based Methods to Build E-mail Lists

1. To increase the likelihood of e-mail delivery even further, use permission-based methods (also known as opt-in.)  By using such methods, you explicitly receive permission from users to send them e-mail and thereby initiate a relationship that most e-mail software can detect and exempt from spam-protection.

2. Users can further cement the relationship by adding the sender's address to their whitelist.

Do Not Buy E-mail Lists or Harvest Web Sites/Lists

1. E-mail lists available for purchase are most certainly accumulated through illegal means, and, as such, contain a list of recipients who probably will never see your e-mail messages. In fact, such lists will most likely contain spamtraps. If you send an e-mail to a spamtrap, you can expect your IP address to be banned for a considerable amount of time.

Manage Your E-mail Lists Regularly

1. Per CAN-SPAM Act, promptly remove addresses of users that no longer wish to receive e-mail from your business.

2. Promptly remove addresses that hard bounce; soft bounce addresses can wait.

3. Remove old addresses that you have not used in some time.

4. Remove newer addresses of users that have not engaged with you (for whatever reason).

Throttle the Delivery of E-mail Messages to Large Lists

1. Even if your e-mail delivery application and service provider permits the delivery of e-mail to large lists at once, other service providers and ISPs may view it as unsolicited bulk e-mail and therefore not deliver the message to everyone on your list. If it appears that this is happening, then break down the list into smaller ones and send the message to each one over the period of a day or several days (depending on the size of your lists.)