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How to find my limitations and methods to not get blacklisted, trash/spam moved for sending emails?

I have growing number of like 10000 e-mail adressess and e-mails that I have to send on daily basis regarding:

  • user registration
  • reminders
  • confirmations
  • news

I want to send mailing to my community but am afraid of beeing blacklisted. It happend few times when years back then was sending mailings from virtual server.

Now I own my dedicated server and want come back to sending lare ammount of e-mails (all sort of reasons listed above).

Szymon Toda
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3 Answers3

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Don't send junk and you should be fine. If your server is configured to let them go out, then the rest is out of your control. The best you can do is to ensure you have "good looking" email content.

Spam filters are usually set up to flag certain words too, like: $%&^, %£!$ and or course $*%^. So you need to avoid the obvious ones, if your email sounds unprofessional, or looks like you are trying to market a Sex Toy Scam (for example) then you are more likely to be spam flagged.

Also, I have found providing both a HTML and Plain Text version of each email body can make a big difference in your spam scores at the other end.

Here is something that might provide some other ideas for you.

Community
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musefan
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  • What do you mean saying "I have found provide both a HTML and Plain Text version of each email body can make a big difference in your spam scores at the other end." – Szymon Toda Sep 11 '12 at 15:13
  • Email formats can include multiple body views. This is typically a HTML view (for primary use) and a plain text version to support clients that cannot handle HMTL. Although most clients can support it, spam filters still use this to rate the email. The link I posted shows how that can be done in .Net, I cannot say how you can do it on your Apache server though – musefan Sep 11 '12 at 15:18
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Other than ensuring that the people you are sending email to actually want to receive those emails by specifically opting-in for reminders/news/anything non-essential like registrations, you could try using a mass mailer like constant contact who has a RestAPI.

The email itself should be well formed. It shouldn't have any missing required headers (like Date: or To:) and the body should conform to the Content-Type header, either being all text if it's content is text, or if there is HTML, to use multipart-mime and include a text version in one part, and html in the other. Also, don't include links to shady places that could be blacklisted.

Jon Lin
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  • Make sure your mailing list is opt-in or provide an easy way for your community members to opt-out.
  • Provide the opt-in/out link directly in every email message.
  • Make it highly visible!
  • Send only to your community members.
  • Don't annoy them everyday with meaningless crap.
  • Even being careful and providing opt-in/out for your members you can't force them to use it.
  • Realize that email clients make it easier to just flag it as spam.
Dave Rager
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  • Its not for spam! Just for regular day use as every community does. BTW who and chow "check" if what Im sending is spam? – Szymon Toda Sep 11 '12 at 15:15
  • @user1656447: It is the end user that determines if what you are sending is spam. You can have all the good intent in the world, but if the person receiving these emails gets tired of them, then they may flag them as spam. I am not sure exactly how public clients such as yahoo mail work, but I imagine if enough people add a specific domain to their spam list then it may effect Yahoo's (for example) general spam rules. Dave Rager has given some good tips for how to give your target audience what they want (and what they are willing to put up with) – musefan Sep 11 '12 at 15:21
  • The email clients I use, gmail, yahoo and Thunderbird all make it easy to flag an email as spam without even opening it. Even an opt-out link in big bold letters at the top of your message is worthless if they don't even open it. Provide your users what they want and understand that no matter what, some will probably flag it as spam anyway. – Dave Rager Sep 11 '12 at 15:35