Are your emails finding their way into your clients' spam filters? More and more companies are finding this a problem and are starting to wonder why spam filters are getting it so wrong.

In fact, it is often the case that this symptom is due to the way the company conducts itself, the actions of its employees and also the actions of its contacts.

A single email will be inspected by several spam filters before it reaches its destination. If any one of these filters raises a question mark about the email. This specific email will usually end up being filtered out as spam and a black mark may be placed against your mail server and/or your entire email domain name.

Unfortunately, with so much spam on the internet these days, the people who control the spam filters have no time for marginal issues and will not listen to anyone who tries to reason with them. Instead, we must understand them and understand how they make their decisions so that we can avoid the pitfalls.

What is spam?

Firstly, it is important to understand that there is no published information that describes what spam is. If there was a definition then it would be easy for spammers to devise an alternative that sits outside of this scope. So, we have to look at the most common trends that easily identify a spammer and make sure we avoid using similar tactics in our day-to-day work.

While there are no rules here, most spam filters will take a dim view of an email that:

• Describes a breakthrough of some sort
• Talks about lots of money
• Discusses a money-back guarantee
• Stresses about something being urgent
• Contains phrases of all capital letters
• Contains lots of exclamation marks!!!
• Contains text in bright colours like green or bright red
• Contain a large image and very little text
• Poor HTML coding - particularly coding that originates from Microsoft Word derived web pages

Abuse reports

If you send an email to somebody and they hit a 'report as spam' button in their email software then you will be reported as a possible spammer. If you get a lot of these then this will lever the spam filters to be less tolerant of your emails and you'll be more likely to end up in a spam filter in future.

However, if you send lots of emails, it might be expected that a few of the recipients might click the spam button. Some of these will be by mistake, some will be mis-guided and a few might be genuinly annoyed with you. However, the spam systems know how many emails that you send land in mailboxes. They will calculate these spam reports as a ratio against the number of emails that have been received. So, if you send a million geniune emails and get reported 100 times then it's not all that bad. However, only send 200 emails and get 100 reports of spam and you'll be ringing alarm bells.

Many companies now operate very friendly unsubscribe systems to encourage people to unsubscribe if they are not happy to receive your emails. They do this in the hope that you'll unsubscribe instead of hitting the 'spam' button as an unsubscribe does them no harm.

The way that companies build their email database is also important. If the contact has specifically opted-in to the mailing list then they are far less likely to hit the spam button when they receive an email from you. However, if you simply build a list of email addresses from all kinds of sources and start emailing them then you have to expect that many of will start hitting that spam button and harming your good reputation.

If you would like further advise on this subject, please fill in the free callback request form or telephone us.