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.

There's an excellent article on the AOL Postmaster blog this morning which discusses the difference between recipients giving permission to receive your mail and actually requesting to receive it.

We all talk about permission based email marketing and how important it is to ensure your mail is delivered reliably to your recipient's inbox, but this article shows that while a recipient may technically have given permission to receive your mail they did not actually request it.

In the example they provide they show that the sender required users to give permission to be on their mailing list before allowing them to carry out a primary function on their website (effectively a forced opt-in) and thus the sender experienced a large number of complaints and delivery problems.

So, here's a few points you should remember:

• Recipients should always request to receive your mailings (for example a sign box on your website or a tickbox shown next to other forms on your site)
• Make sure that potential recipients know what your mailings will be about, how often they should expect to receive them and re-affirm that they can unsubscribe at any time.
• Don't force a recipient to sign up to your mailing list before being able to achieve some task on your site.
• Don't assume that just because somebody has given you their email address that they want to be on your mailing list.   You must always provide a mechanism (ie; tickbox) for them to indicate they want to be on your mailing list.   Adding your entire address book from Outlook is not an option!
• Ensure that recipients can unsubscribe from your mailings with one click and that you honour that unsubscribe from that day forward (Suite26 will do this for you automatically but you must ensure any further back-end databases you may have honours the unsubscribe too)

Finally, the AOL article touches on the topic of engagement.   AOL, among others, keep statistics on how many users click on your mail, how many click to display images, how many click the spam button, how many reply, how many click the not spam button along with other metrics to figure out how engaging your mailings are.   If you regularly get a low engagement score then you could find your mails ending up in the spam folder or maybe not even being delivered at all!   We will be writing more on engagement and the future of deliverability in some upcoming blog posts.

You can read the full article on the AOL blog here: http://postmaster-blog.aol.com/2009/12/03/p/

Do you want to grow your email list quickly and get your marketing out to as many potential clients as possible? Been approached by a "reputable" list vendor offering you thousands of "legitimate" opt-in addresses?

However tempting it may seem, just don't go there. We're not just talking here about the dodgy providers who offer millions of addresses for peanuts, but the more professional looking ones who will provide you with a segmented, opt-in list from people who have agreed to receive "3rd party" marketing about your chosen subject.

The main problem here is that the recipients on these lists will not have the slightest clue who you are. No matter what permission they gave to receive "3rd party" mailings they have not given you their permission to email them. Sending mail to these people will have many of them hitting the Report Spam button in their email client and if too many do that your domain is going to end up on spam blacklists. Can you afford for your brand to become blacklisted and have your reputation tarnished?

The next problem is you have no idea when and where the address was collected - it could have been added to the list years ago and may no longer even be in use. Sending email to non-existent or dead addresses will also count against you and you could again end up on one of those blacklists. What's more, if you receive a complaint and are asked to prove where you got the address, which site they opted in on along with date/time/IP address - could you provide that information?

Then you run into the relevancy issue. The recipients who do actually receive your mail, don't report you for spamming and open it up may not even find the content relevant to them (after all they have no idea who you are) - they'll just delete it.

So, you spent all that money on buying/renting a list then money on sending it out only to find most did not arrive, the ones that did weren't opened, you've got a ton of spam complaints and your domain is on a number of blacklists - now it doesn't seem like such a tempting idea after all!

Oh and finally using a purchased/rented list will break the Ts and Cs and anti-spam policies of almost any ESP - us included. So just don't bother - we can see purchased lists a mile off.

By adding an authenticated domain into your Suite26 account you could improve the deliverability of your e-mail campaigns.   Sending from an authenticated domain ensures your mail is signed by DomainKeys, DKIM and validates against SPF records.   Additionally, the link tracking URLs in your campaign will use the same authenticated domain which can sometimes help when it comes to getting past spam filters on your recipient's computers.

An authenticated domain is by no means a guaranteed way of ensuring your email does not end up in spam folder, but it can certainly help.

For more information please see our help article about authenticated domains, DomainKeys, DKIM and SPF.

Setting up a domain is easy and should only take a few minutes.   You will need to know how to make some DNS entries for your domain (your web host should be able to help you with this).  If your domain is already hosted with Global Gold then we can make the changes for you.

There are no disadvantages to setting up and authenticated domain, only advantages, therefore we recommend that all users set up an authenticated domain as soon as possible.

Full instructions can be found in our help centre: Set up an authenticated domain for DomainKeys, DKIM, SPF and SenderID

As always, if you need any assistance please do not hesitate to contact us.

Suite26 has started integrating with the feedback loops of a number of the major mail providers (AOL, Hotmail etc).

These providers often provide a 'Report Spam' or 'Spam' button within their interface which users can click on to mark a message as spam.  Unfortunately, some recipients use these buttons as a quick way of unsubscribing instead of finding and using the link within the e-mail itself.   It is therefore very important to ensure that these recipients are unsubscribed from your lists.

By integrating with the provider's feedback loop, Suite26 will receive an automated notification whenever these buttons are used and we can then locate the original recipient and ensure they are unsubscribed from future mailings.

Any contacts which are unsubscribed in this way will appear in your e-mail reports with 'Feedback Loop' as the unsubscribe reason.

It is very important that you honour these unsubscribe requests in the same way as any other.   If you continue sending mail to recipients who have unsubscribed in this way it is very likely that you will be blocked from sending mail to any addresses by that provider.

If you have any questions regarding this feature or require any other help with deliverability and spam related issues, please do not hesitate to contact support@26.co.uk