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

Use email authentication methods, such as SPF, and DKIM to prove that your emails and your domain name belong together, and to prevent spoofing of your domain name. The SPF website includes a wizard to generate the DNS information for your site.

Check your reverse DNS to make sure the IP address of your mail server points to the domain name that you use for sending mail.

Make sure that the IP-address that you're using is not on a blacklist

Make sure that the reply-to address is a valid, existing address.

Use the full, real name of the addressee in the To field, not just the email-address (e.g. "John Smith" <[e-mail]> ).

Monitor your abuse accounts, such as [e-mail] and [e-mail]. That means - make sure that these accounts exist, read what's sent to them, and act on complaints.

Finally, make it really easy to unsubscribe. Otherwise, your users will unsubscribe by pressing the spam button, and that will affect your reputation.

That said, getting Hotmail to accept your emails remains a black art.

Answer 2

I hate to tell you, but I and others may be using white-list defaults to control our filtering of spam.

This means that all e-mail from an unknown source is automatically spam and diverted into a spam folder. (I don't let my e-mail service delete spam, because I want to always review the arrivals for false positives, something that is pretty easy to do by a quick scan of the folder.)

I even have e-mail from myself go to the spam bucket because (1) I usually don't send e-mail to myself and (2) there are spammers that fake my return address in spam sent to me.

So to get out of the spam designation, I have to consider that your mail might be legitimate (from sender and subject information) and open it first in plaintext (my default for all incoming mail, spam or not) to see if it is legitimate. My spam folder will not use any links in e-mails so I am protected against tricky image links and other misbehavior.

If I want future arrivals from the same source to go to my in box and not be diverted for spam review, I will specify that to my e-mail client. For those organizations that use bulk-mail forwarders and unique sender addresses per mail piece, that's too bad. They never get my approval and always show up in my spam folder, and if I'm busy I will never look at them.

Finally, if an e-mail is not legible in plaintext, even when sent as HTML, I am likely to just delete it unless it is something that I know is of interest to me by virtue of the source and previous valuable experiences.

As you can see, it is ultimately under an users control and there is no automated act that will convince such a system that your mail is legitimate from its structure alone. In this case, you need to play nice, don't do anything that is similar to phishing, and make it easy for users willing to trust your mail to add you to their white list.

Answer 3

I've found that using the recipients real first and last name in the body is a sure fire way of getting through a spam filter.