BEST TIPS ON BEST EMAIL DELIVERABILITY 2011 (PART 1)

Here you will find ultimate rules and tips for good email deliverability to major Email Service Providers.To optimize your delivery you must work conscientiously on the following:

• Sending fields' adjusting
• Manage your content and HTML code
• Be careful with your email list
• Working with abuses and complaints

Making right sending fields

1. Never use deceptive headers, from-names, reply-to, or subject lines.
2. Generic email addresses like: contact@yourdomain.com, info@yourdomain.com, support@yourdomain.com , etc should be avoided and not used in your reply-to and sender fields.
3. In order to make impression of a serious and professional man/company don’t use popular ESP webmail, try to use a recognizable business email address.Use the following email structure your.name@yourdomain.com instead of yourname.yourdomain@gmail.com.If you use yahoo, aol, gmail etc sender email and your contact list is predominated with the same ESP emails ISP’s may bounce your email; they don’t like this.
4. Spam words like “promotions”, “free”, “act now”, “limited time”, etc are dangerous and are prohibited to use. Don’t overuse exclamation points (!!!!!) and ALL CAPS TURNED ON.
5. Don’t use the word “test” in your subject line.

Email Body and HTML

1. Overusing of formatting, fancy colors and styles is an disadvantage.
2. Remember mortgage, pharmacy and make money are spam words. Replace them as much as possible, or better stay away from the industry.
3. Do you use a WYSIWYG? If yes, be careful, check if your HTML is clean. I’m talking about useless code that WYSIWYG uses, it’s invisible to the user but not to spam filters. Be careful not to be a spammer.
4. Bad HTML in general can get you spam filtered. Missing table tags, content below the closing tag, or empty tags will get your message thrown into the junk folder.
5. Avoid CSS, as many email clients strip it out or over-write it. If your designers insist on using it, keep it to a minimum and only use simple attributes, such as text style and color, and be sure they use inline styles.
6. If you send test campaigns, use content that’s as real as possible. Don’t multiply the same paragraphs.All the duplicate content is detected with spam filters; they also recognize any "non-human language" text.
7. Use both HTML text and images in the message, not all images. In this way, recipients are still able to read the message if the images are turned off.
8. Do not use too many links within the HTML. Too many links in the message can make your email look spammy.
9. Check all the links against major blacklists.The use of blacklisted URLs will ban the sending domain for a pretty long time.
10. Remember once again! Include plain text in your email.
11. It’s a really good idea to also include some kind of reminder text, like "You are receiving this email because you signed up at our website."

Note 1: The ISPs are scanning blacklists for URLs and domain names.If they find your company’s domain name in a blacklist, they’ll block all future emails with that domain name in it.Note 2: Recently, Orange (orange.fr & wanadoo.fr) has changed its privacy policy and implemented a highly aggressive anti-spam filter, that allows delivery only of those emails whose senders are whitelisted, or on the recipients’ contact list.The emails that are not white listed are delivered with a considerable delay and most often to junk folder.