Emailing Contact List and Junk

chief_stains

Hi,

I have an contact list of over 1,000 emails. I'm sending a monthly newsletter automatically with a php script. I estimate about 10% of the emails are going into peoples junk boxes. Is there anything I can do from my end to stop this..?

Thanks...

di11on

Sounds like their junk mail filtering is working nicely then

chief_stains

I know - nightmare - but the thing is its the people whos filters are working that are screaming for the freakin mail!

di11on

Typical!!

I'd be interested to see the replies as I'd like to do something similar myself.

I suppose it would be a matter of people telling their email client to not treat email from you as junk... I don't imaging there's much you can do at your end?

seamus

Just check your email headers perhaps. If you check Google, I'm sure there are certain headers you can add/modify to make your mail look a little less like a mail shot.

Many newsletters do get caught by junk filters though, junk filters aren't just for pure spam. It's really the recipient's problem if the mail they want is going into their junk folder. "You may need to configure your junk mail settings to whitelist myaddress@mydomain.com" is all you need to respond with.

mneylon

What format is the email in?

Where is the email being sent from? ie. clean Irish IP or potentially tainted US IP

Do you have SPF records setup for your domain?

Is the mail being sent using sendmail with the -f switch?

Are you using Javascript in the email?

Are you seeing more mail being blocked by Hotmail than other receivers?

chief_stains

What format is the email in? Its a html email

Where is the email being sent from? ie. clean Irish IP or potentially tainted US IP: Not Irish or US and not tainted to my knowledge

Do you have SPF records setup for your domain? Not at the moment

Is the mail being sent using sendmail with the -f switch? its actually in ASP at the moment, sorry, will be PHP soon

Are you using Javascript in the email? No

Are you seeing more mail being blocked by Hotmail than other receivers? No, lots of differnet ones

mneylon

chief_stains wrote: »

What format is the email in? Its a html email

That could be part of the problem depending on the html formatting

chief_stains wrote: »

Where is the email being sent from? ie. clean Irish IP or potentially tainted US IP: Not Irish or US and not tainted to my knowledge

You might want to check that

chief_stains wrote: »

Do you have SPF records setup for your domain? Not at the moment

They're not hard to setup. More on them here: http://www.mneylon.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=12&search=spf

chief_stains wrote: »

Is the mail being sent using sendmail with the -f switch? its actually in ASP at the moment, sorry, will be PHP soon

Sorry. The key thing here is how the mail is seen in terms of the sender. A lot of mail servers will treat mails from server scripts as being dodgy ...

chief_stains wrote: »

Are you using Javascript in the email? No

Good

chief_stains wrote: »

Are you seeing more mail being blocked by Hotmail than other receivers? No, lots of differnet ones

Like who?

chief_stains

Checked the headers from a test into gmail...

Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: 111.222.333.444 is neither permitted
 nor denied by best guess record for domain of info@******.net)

Most of the domains that were junking the mail were not Hotmail or Gmail, in fact I don't think any of them were.

I have a feeling the it is being stopped for the content in the mail. A lot of it is financial/investment information. This would trigger the spam filter, wouldn't it..?!?

mneylon

You're better off setting up spf etc., if you can

chief_stains

ok, thanks for the help...

seamus

Also, I'm not sure what your script is doing, but if you can configure it to send directly to each email address (i.e. one email per address) as opposed to sending it to a mailing list or BCCing 1,000 people, then that can improve your chances too.

Check with your host/ISP before this about their policy on such things.

chief_stains

yeah, the script is a loop through a database of the emails... it selects one email add. and sends the mail to it, so its only one address per mail....

i'll play around with all the suggestions and see if it improves it... thanks for the help/time lads

colm_c

I know with campaign monitor - www.campaignmonitor.com - a newsletter sending platform - they have a spam checker which allows you to run your email through it and checks for keywords etc. that might be considered spam, before sending it out.

You might be able to find something that does this on it's own.

Sidenote: I would have thought using some pre-built software was a lot easier and more reliable than rolling your own asp script?