Spam filters check many aspects of emails received. In this article, you can find common advice on how you can prevent your email from getting trapped inside spam filters and blacklists.
1. Avoid using spam trigger words.
It is not a secret that spam filters could block email for using some specified words, called triggers. Some spam filters are triggered by certain words in the subject line or the body of the email. Check such trigger words on this comprehensive list.
The subject line is a very sensitive area. Spam filters will certainly block email with empty or capitalized subject line, with lots of white spaces, too many exclamation marks or dollar signs.
Use correct text and title, avoid capitalization at all costs, and you should have no problems with spam filters.
Spam filters recognize spam messages by analyzing a message content for spam characteristics. Sometimes these filters fail and mark legitimate emails as spam. This failure is called a 'false positive' as it marks a legitimate non-spam message as spam. Newsletter senders and email marketers need to check that their emails do not have spam characteristics in order to lower the risk of their newsletters being marked as spam.
2. Virus Free
Your computer as well as your network should be virus free to make sure that the emails you send are also fully virus free.
3. Check if your mail service uses SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) records.
It is necessary to know that most mail providers reject or mark messages as spam if there is no valid DNS configuration.
AliDropship hosting servers have SPF, DKIM and also PTR (Reverse DNS record which resolves an IP address to a fully-qualified domain name) records by default.
However please note that the default server webmail is sometimes deemed as 'untrustworthy' by the mail services. It is recommended to use a dedicated email server provider, a service that is specifically designed for this particular task.
4. Use reputable email service provider
The server you are using to send your email newsletters plays a vital role in determining whether or not your newsletter will reach its supposed recipients. It is equally important for email notifications and for messages. In this Knowledge Base section you can find recommended mail services to use for AliDropship plugin email notifications. For email messages, we recommend using Google Mail or a free Yandex Mail service.
5. Common recommendations if you use your email address not only for personal emails but also for email marketing:
Don’t buy lists of email addresses. If you don’t have the express permission to email someone, they much more likely will report your emails as spam. You can find helpful tips how to collect email addresses in our blog.
Regularly clean up your email list. Some of your recipients will unsubscribe from your email list, but others may simply ignore your emails instead of unsubscribing. This lowers your email engagement rate and your emails are more likely to go to the spam folder.
Provide an easy way to unsubscribe. Your contact could hit the spam button if there will be no unsubscribe option in your email.
If possible, do not send HTML-only messages (send plain-text messages instead, or multi-part MIME messages with a text/plain component). If you do send HTML-only messages, make sure they use valid HTML markup. You can use the W3C Markup Validation Service to test content (you can test a URL, upload a file, or paste HTML into a text box).