How to Avoid Your Outbound Emails Getting Marked as Spam

No one likes spam, and no we're not talking about the canned goodies commonly found in grocery stores. Detailed below will be a bunch of common tips and tricks to help avoid your outbound e-mails from ending up in the spam box.

First and foremost, having proper Email Authentication set-up is absolutely crucial. With email authentication enabled, you will be preventing a common tactic that ends up getting domains blacklisted: Email Spoofing. Having authentication will verify that emails originating from the sender are actually from the person listed in the "From:" field. For more detailed information about Email Authentication and what it does, this page has quite a bit -> http://rejoiner.com/resources/email-authentication/ 

Another method you can employ to reduce the chances of being dumped in the spam box is to verify that the e-mail you're composing is well-formed and contains optimized images as well as a balanced ratio of text to images in the content. If you're including HTML, verify that it is formatted completely and correctly. There are many free tools online that you can use to test your e-mails to verify the quality of the mail you are sending. Below is a few of the ones available.

• http://isnotspam.com/
• https://glockapps.com/spam-testing/
• https://litmus.com/spam-filter-tests
• https://www.mail-tester.com/ 

If you're sending commercial emails, it is absolutely worth visiting https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/rules/rulemaking-regulatory-reform-proceedings/can-spam-rule to verify that you are in compliance.

Something I've seen quite a bit that goes unchecked is verifying whether or not your email(s) or domain(s) are already blacklisted. This can also be verified fairly easily online with different tools. Here's a few:

• https://dnschecker.org/ip-blacklist-checker.php
• https://www.ipvoid.com/ip-blacklist-check/
• https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx    (Commonly used by quite a few large service providers that I have worked with)

When sending emails, an IP address or domain's reputation is checked. If you have never sent emails from your domain or server before, then there is no reputation whether it be positive or negative. As a result of this, the majority of large mailbox services are likely to flag your mail as spam. A way to avoid this issue is to use a SMTP Relay. Check out our guide on setting up Postfix to use the Gmail Relay -> https://help.skysilk.com/support/solutions/articles/9000151194-how-to-use-postfix-to-send-outbound-email-as-gmail-relay 

Personally, I typically flag unknown marketing emails as spam since I never requested to receive them. Most of these senders simply purchased a huge combined list of emails for their marketing and are sending en masse. This is an easy way to hurt your sender reputation. The simple way to avoid this is to organically gather your contacts through ethical means. There are countless ways to achieve this. Linked below are two sources that can assist you on the path:

• https://www.space48.com/blog/7-tips-to-grow-your-email-list-organically/
• https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/killer-email-list/

A big no-no is using what is considered "Spammy Language". Basically all modern spam filters monitor and analyze the wording and language in your mail. Excessive use of capitalized letters, punctuation symbols, and even certain phrases that are commonly used by spammers will usually land you in spam jail.

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That wraps up our Getting Started guide on preventing outbound emails from getting tossed in the spam box.

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