RSSMarch 23rd, 2007
Defend your newsletter against spam filters!
When it comes to sending HTML email messages to a large number of people, web developers need all the help they can get. Not only are web browsers much more advanced in parsing HTML/CSS properly, but there’s the whole privacy/spam issue to deal with.
Spam will only get worse before it gets better. Popular web clients like AOL and Hotmail are among the toughest that I know of to blacklist servers, and I understand why. So as web developers, we have to continually find best practices and tools that will keep clients and list subscribers happy.
I recently found a very useful tool that can provide some insight on what spam filters look for and how your legitimate email can get through to subscribers. It’s called Email Check, and it’s a service from Active Campaign.
Simply enter in your newsletter details, such as sender/recipient name and email, subject and the message source. Once submitted, the newsletter will be checked against the very popular spam filter, SpamAssassin.
Email Check will then produce some very useful information about the email. First off, it gets a score from 0 - 7, zero being the best. The BEST part is that it also lists potential “problem areas”.
When running a recent email through, I learned about a couple problem areas within the copy and made quick changes to enhance my score. My final score on a recent email was 0.9, an estimated 12% chance the message will be marked as spam. I was satisfied with that result considering all of the HTML source in the body of the email. That in itself is a trigger for many filters.
I find the Email Check service to be a quick and FREE way to instantly build better emails, and now an essential to my testing suite.
Here are a few other resources I have recently found useful in building and testing HTML emails:
- How to test HTML emails
- Improve your email delivery rates
- EmailStatCenter.com- A new resource of email marketing metrics
Posted in Web Development -
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