When creating your email campaigns you want to do everything you can to ensure that your mail reaches your recipient's inbox.  Whilst most spam filters keep tight lipped about what would cause a message to be marked as spam, Microsoft has released a short guide of things to avoid getting caught in the Outlook junk filter.

You'll find the guide here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA010450051033.aspx

Most points there are fairly obvious and would never be used by legitimate mailers, but a couple there may catch people out who use a term in a legitimate way.

The guide is not a complete list and there are many other factors that could still cause your email to get blocked.   It should also be noted that this guide is for the filter built into the Outlook client only.

Here at Suite26 we always advise you to test your email campaigns as much as possible in as many different email clients before sending.   It's easy to register a Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail account and just send a preview message to those accounts, but we would also recommend using an email testing service such as LitmusApp which will test your email in a number of different email clients and against lots of different spam filters.

We've recently made some improvements to our export contacts functionality.

• You can now select which contacts you wish to export.  This includes all contacts, a contact group, a saved filter or a custom subset which you create on the fly using the segmentation filter.
• You can choose 5 different text file types to export to.
• You can select which fields appear in your export.
• We've added a progress bar while the system writes your file so you can see that the system is still active during large downloads.

On top of those changes you can also view your recent exports from the contacts dashboard and re-download the file.

Please see our step-by-step guide to exporting contacts for full details.

You can now create saved filters on your contacts database using our segmentation filter.

You can then use this filter when sending an e-mail campaign to quickly send to the specified contacts.

For full details, please see our help article on setting up a saved contact filter.