How do you make sure email you send programmatical

Question

This is a tricky one and I've always relied on techniques, such as permission-based emails (i.e. only sending to people you have permission to send to) and not using blatantly spamish terminology.

Of late, some of the emails I send out programmatically have started being shuffled into people's spam folder automatically and I'm wondering what I can do about it.

This is despite the fact that these particular emails are not ones that humans would mark as spam, specifically, they are emails that contain license keys that people have paid good money for, so I don't think they're going to consider them spam

I figure this is a big topic in which I am essentially an ignorant simpleton.

Answer 1

In the UK it's also best practice to include a real physical address for your company and its registered number.

That way it's all open and honest and they're less likely to manually mark it as spam.

Answer 2

Google has a tool and guidelines for this. You can find them on: https://postmaster.google.com/ Register and verify your domain name and Google provides an individual scoring of that IP-address and domain.

From the bulk senders guidelines:

Authentication ensures that your messages can be correctly classified. Emails that lack authentication are likely to be rejected or placed in the spam folder, given the high likelihood that they are forged messages used for phishing scams. In addition, unauthenticated emails with attachments may be outrightly rejected, for security reasons.

To ensure that Gmail can identify you:

• Use a consistent IP address to send bulk mail.
• Keep valid reverse DNS records for the IP address(es) from which you send mail, pointing to your domain.

• Use the same address in the 'From:' header on every bulk mail you send. We also recommend the following:

• Sign messages with DKIM. We do not authenticate messages signed with keys using fewer than 1024 bits.

• Publish an SPF record.
• Publish a DMARC policy.

Answer 3

You may consider a third party email service who handles delivery issues:

• Exact Target
• Vertical Response
• Constant Contact
• Campaign Monitor
• Emma
• Return Path
• IntelliContact
• SilverPop

Answer 4

I have had the same problem in the past on many sites I have done here at work. The only guaranteed method of making sure the user gets the email is to advise the user to add you to there safe list. Any other method is really only going to be something that can help with it and isn't guaranteed.

Answer 5

one of my application's emails was constantly being tagged as spam. it was html with a single link, which i sent as html in the body with a text/html content type.

my most successful resolution to this problem was to compose the email so it looked like it was generated by an email client.

i changed the email to be a multipart/alternative mime document and i now generate both text/plain and text/html parts.

the email no longer is detected as junk by outlook.

Answer 6

It could very well be the case that people who sign up for your service are entering emails with typing mistakes that you do not correct. For example: [e-mail] -or- [e-mail].

And such domains are configured to be used as spamtraps which will automatically flag your email server's IP and/or domain and hurt its reputation.

To avoid this, do a double-check for the email address that is entered upon your product subscription. Also, send a confirmation email to really ensure that this email address is 100% validated by a human being that is entering the confirmation email, before you send them the product key or accept their subscription. The verification email should require the recipient to click a link or reply in order to really confirm that the owner of the mailbox is the person who signed up.