Preventing emails being marked as spam

Russinating

Russinating

Russinating

Soldato
Joined
27 Dec 2005
Posts
17,316
Location
Bristol
This is a genuine request for some info about reducing the chances of our normal day-to-day emails being marked as spam. We've had a number of people say our emails went into their junk instead of their inbox, from varying email providers, and we're not quite sure why.

The content is just normal business stuff and it's totally solicited - sometimes even a reply.

We use signatures like this: http://www.idoweddingfilms.co.uk/SIGNATURES/Signature - Russell.html

Would it be better to switch to a non-HTML sig?

We also send out bulk emails using our email addresses as the from/reply-to, which I fear has tarnished the domain/specific emails. Is this possible? If so, would it better to send bulk emails from another domain, ie idoweddingfilmsmail.co.uk rather than our main addresses?
 
As ever with e-mail, it could be all manner of things.

Three issues that spring to mind, however:

  • Maybe your ESPs don't have a great reputation
  • The ratio of HTML [in your sig] to text might be tripping the spam filters
  • Certain keywords probably aren't helping - "entrepreneurs" for instance, can have a high Spam Assassin weighting. Other words like "awards" "winners" and "perfect" may not be helping, either.

Your HTML sig is quite chunky for a standard business sig, and even though it's sympathetically coded for the medium - mainly formatted text in old-skool code - the table-based layout might be the thing dropping it into junk.

So yeah - I'd test a text-only sig, or one that just uses the left hand side of your HTML sig [minus the table layout] to see if that makes a difference.

Second issue: Yeah, it's definitely possible. Check with something like https://www.senderscore.org/blacklistlookup/
 
Will test the left-only idea. Would also mean there's no image attachment. Updated the sig in the OP.

What IP do I need to input into SenderScore? Here's an original header from an email I've just sent to myself:

Code: 
Delivered-To: ME
Received: by 10.231.172.208 with SMTP id m16cs27177ibz;
        Tue, 14 Sep 2010 09:41:40 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.216.10.77 with SMTP id 55mr180582weu.17.1284482496502;
        Tue, 14 Sep 2010 09:41:36 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path: <[email protected]>
Received: from caracas.footholds.net (caracas.footholds.net [91.198.165.201])
        by mx.google.com with ESMTP id r9si498900weq.30.2010.09.14.09.41.36;
        Tue, 14 Sep 2010 09:41:36 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: 91.198.165.201 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of [email protected]) client-ip=91.198.165.201;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=neutral (google.com: 91.198.165.201 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of [email protected]) [email protected]
Received: from 93-97-97-100.zone5.bethere.co.uk ([93.97.97.100] helo=[192.168.1.67])
	by caracas.footholds.net with esmtps (TLSv1:AES256-SHA:256)
	(Exim 4.69)
	(envelope-from <[email protected]>)
	id 1OvYZa-0003AM-I6
	for ME; Tue, 14 Sep 2010 17:41:34 +0100
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2010 17:41:36 +0100
From: Russell Jones <[email protected]>
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100802 Lightning/1.0b2 Thunderbird/3.1.2
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: ME
Subject: Test
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-AntiAbuse: This header was added to track abuse, please include it with any abuse report
X-AntiAbuse: Primary Hostname - caracas.footholds.net
X-AntiAbuse: Original Domain - gmail.com
X-AntiAbuse: Originator/Caller UID/GID - [47 12] / [47 12]
X-AntiAbuse: Sender Address Domain - idoweddingfilms.co.uk

* Emails replaced :).
 
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On the subject, our eshot provider is up for renewal. Any recommendations?

We only need to store about 5k contacts, but have about 15k total. Send a maximum of 10k every month.
 
Russinating said:
On the subject, our eshot provider is up for renewal. Any recommendations?
Click to expand...
Yes, but I'd be breaking forum rules on self-promotion :D

Can't really go wrong with either Campaign Monitor or Mailchimp if you intend to control/test/send broadcasts, and you have a good clean data list.
 
Last edited:
Three things to check.

Your outbound server has reverse DNS setup
Your domain has an SPF record
You have enough content in your mail
 
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