TIPS TO AVOID YOUR EMAIL GOING INTO SPAM OR JUNK FOLDERS
In order to protect against spam and other malicious emails, security and email companies use complex algorithms to automatically checkemails and decide whether they go into an email account's Inbox or Junk/Spam folder. While it's rarely an issue, if email is vital to your business then there's a number of good rules to follow:
1 - Be Compliant with the CAN-SPAM Act
< Although
it's an American law, most technology companies use the 7 requirements
specified in the CAN-SPAM Act as an important part of their anti-spam
algorithms.
You can click here to read the full guide.
These rules are mainly important for marketing emails, however, even if
your emails aren't marketing related it's a good idea to have your
emails roughly follow them. It's basics state the following:
-
Don’t use false or misleading header information - Make sure you use a
valid email address in the to/from/reply to, etc fields
- Don’t use deceptive subject lines - Make sure the subject clearly and simply states what the email is about
- Identify the message as an ad - Make sure that a marketing/advertisement email is clearly noted as such
- Tell recipients where you’re located - This is commonly included in the signature
-
Tell recipients how to opt-out of receiving future email from you - You
can ask your developer how to add an "unsubscribe" link to your
marketing emails
- Honour opt-out requests promptly
-
Monitor what others are doing on your behalf - Check what emails other
people in your organisation are sending from your domain
2 - Avoid Spam and Phishing related trigger words and phrases
One
of the first things a good spam filter does is look for words that
relate to subjects often used in spam or phishing emails. While there
isn't a specific list of these words (it changes regularly and the
specific words are hidden to make things harder for spammers), words
that easily relate to these subjects are likely to trigger a spam
filter. Sometimes the use of these words is unavoidable due to business
reasons. In this case, you should be extra careful in following the
other tips listed here. A list of subjects who's related words you
should avoid/minimise are:
- Any Adult/R18/XXX related words
- Money/banking/finance-related words. Bank/Paypal phishing emails are some of the most common.
- Pharmaceutical/drug related words, especially common drug names
- Names of fashion brands, especially popular one. Spammers commonly try to sell counterfeit goods3 - Sent emails as Text rather than HTML
As
plain text emails have far fewer ways of being manipulated, they are
generally safer and more likely to get through a spam filter than HTML
emails. Off course for Marketing this likely isn't possible, but
wherever else you should try to minimise the use of HTML.
4 - Use a Spam Checker
Before
sending an important email, you might want to run it through a spam
checking tool. There's a number of these tools available online. They
won't ever be 100% correct however they can give you a good idea about
how likely your email is to reach its intended recipient:
isnotspam.com -
this site gives you an email address to send your email too so it can
be analysed. Great for marketing emails but not so much for confidential
work.
mail-tester.com - provides a similar service to isnotspam.com
mxtoolbox.com/blacklist -
This checks your domain/server IP against common blacklists, if your
domain or a domain/website link in your email is blacklisted it's very
likely to trigger a spam filter. Note that with Business, Shared and
Reseller hosting, we use a separate group of IP's for sending email so
adding your server IP here won't likely be relevant
melon.com.au/melon-stork - This site lets you copy>paste all the contents of your email so they can be checked against a spam filter
Please
note that the above are 3rd party services, so while we suggest them,
we aren't able to provide any direct support or assistance for them. You
should also be very careful when using these for confidential emails,
and if possible replace important information with dummy data.
5 - Get your server/website of Blacklist
There are a number of websites that will check your domain or server IP to see if it's on a blacklist. These include:
mxtookbox.com/blacklist
rblwater.com
anti-abuse.org/multi-rbl-check/
On
Personal, Business and Reseller plans, emails go through a separate
mail cluster which greatly lessens the effect of having your domain or
server IP on a blacklist. However on a VPS/Dedicated server, having your
IP listed becomes much more important. If this happens, lodge a ticket
to support and we'll look into this further for you.
6 - Maintain a Good Text to Image Ratio and Good Grammar
This is one of the secret tricks spam filters use to detectweather or not an email is Spam. Try to follow the following rules:
- Maintain good spelling and grammar, use a spell checker. Spammers are
commonly from non-English backgrounds, so broken English can trip a
spam filter. They also try to get around trigger words by slightly
misspelling words, for example using N1ke Sh0es instead of Nike Shoes.
-
Try to send at least 2-3 lines of text for every image. If it's an HTML
email make sure to the email has at least a 500 character total.
-
Optimise your images. Try to keep individual pictures under 100KB. This
can be as simple as opening the image in Paint (Windows) or iPhoto
(Mac), resizing the image and saving it as a jpeg/jpg or a png file.
- If you're sending an HTML email, make sure it's cleanly formatted.
7 - Don't use emails purchased through Email Lists
There's
a number of sites which sell lists of email addresses that marketing
emails can be sent to. How useful those lists are really depends on your
business needs. Some email security companies are known to "infiltrate"
these lists by having email addresses known as spam traps included in
the list. The spam trap emails are kept secret, so if an email is sent
to it the security company knows to mark the sender as a spammer. A
better idea is to build an email list through client's who have visited
your website and provided their email willingly.
8 - Avoid Large Attachments and Certain File Types
Spam
filters will always check an attachment and image and may reject things
on file types alone. Images should be sent in .jpg, .gif and .png
formats. Documents should be sent in .pdf when possible. Formats like
.doc and .docx (or other Word/Spreadsheet formats) can have viruses
injected into them so they're more heavily scrutinised, however, they're
normally fine provided you follow the other tips lists. Executable file
types like .exe, .swf and .zip are high risk and should never be
included in an email. If you do need to send a sensitive file type it's
better to upload it to your website or a storage service (Google Drive,
Dropbox, etc) and link to the folder. Make sure to add password
protection if it's a private/confidential file.
You
should also use your website or a storage service for sending large
files rather than attaching them. There are 2 main reasons for this:
Different email servers/services will have different max email size and
max file size limits. Gmail's is 25MB for the total email size,
-
Different email servers/services will have different max email size and
max file size limits. Gmail's is 25MB for the total email size,
however, that is subject to change. Other email services may also change
theirs without notice. Emails which exceed a certain size can be
rejected
- An email receiver's device may be on a slow/unstable
internet connection, so larger emails may time out and not reach the
device
9 - Check Your domain's DKIM, SPF and DMARC records
DKIM,
SPF and DMARC are all TXT type DNS records which a spam filter will
check against when it receives your email. While DKIM and DMAR are very
useful, SPF is now vital and your email almost certainly won't be
received if you exclude it.
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