You probably send out Email blasts all the time with high deliverable rates, especially if you use a reliable Email management service. However, once in a while you find out that your messages are getting disproportionately stopped by spam filters. Why this is happening is a mystery because you are not doing anything you have not done before. Or are you?
Spam filters often use a weighting system to determine if an Email is legitimate or not. If the weight falls below a certain threshold the filter flags the message as spam and it is not delivered to the intended recipient. So even if your Email is totally legit and sent to a proper address, you still might get flagged as a spammer or even a fraudulent “phisher.”
We experienced this first hand in an unusual case. EventRebels sends out hundreds of thousands of Email confirmations for our online registration and trade show software every year, with a very high delivery rate. So we were surprised when we found out that confirmations for a particular meeting were getting targeted as spam by many filters.
There are some great online tools for seeing how your message would be typically evaluated. We use Mail-Tester to research why Email confirmations are not being delivered. For this particular confirmation, which was quite long, there was some wording at the bottom about insurance requirements. They spoke of policies with limits of $500,000 and $1,000,000. Well, it was precisely these kinds of financial figures that triggered the Email as a phishing attempt and consequently spam! We removed the offending paragraph and the problem went away!
Mail tester is easy to use. Go to the web site and you will get an Email address to send the Email message in question. Send your message to that address and then go back to the site and click on the “Test Your Score” link. This is where it gets interesting. You will now see your Email score on a 0 to 10 scale. If the score is below 5, then it has a much higher likelihood to get blocked. If you have a low score, look for the negative scores and review what is said. The most interesting part is your “SpamAssassin” rating, which has specific ways to improve.
By checking out this simple site you can take concrete steps to insure that your perfectly legitimate Email is not treated as spam.
