In this generation, where the computers are the best friends of humans and internet is the best tool, every body will be having atleast one email ID. And due to those ‘green’ thoughts that has crept into many people’s mind, every one is trying to avoid papers as far as possible and so is the companies and email is now one of the strongest medium of communication.

There are many many websites are offering newsletters ( daily , weekly , biweekly monthly etc etc )  – and we might have noticed many of our legit mails fall into the spam box of the recipients.

Have you ever thought what makes a mail spammy ? Or why a mail is considered as a spam ? To understand that that we need to understand what an email is.. Basically every email have 2 parts, one is content and another is header. Content is what matters to the recepients and the headers is what matters to the server.

The header contains many information like

• the IP from which mail was sent
• the original sender ofg the mails
• How the mails were sent
• If there is any authentications implemented ( like DK or SPF )and many more..

Back to our topic, there are basically two ways to scan an email to check if it a potential spam.  One is to scan the headers and other is to scan the content. If we can scan the header and see if it a forged email, then we can easily detect if it is a spam or not ( the probability for such a detected mail to be spam is high )

On the other hand, we can scan the content for suspicious keywords like … you know that

Next is RBLs.. Many email servers like yahoo, comcast, AT&T etc depends on 3rd party to see if the IP from which an email originates is a vulnerable or spammy one. ie if the IP have a poor reputation it’ll badly affect the deliver-ability of your email. There are so much of blacklist agencies awailable today and mjow of them are spamhaus and spamcop. And SenderScore keeps the reputation of your IP.

What are the things we need to implement when sending mass emails ?

1. Send emails only to those who need it. By doing that you eliminate ( or lessen ) the possibility or probability of emails getting marked as spam by the recepients.

2. Use authentication mechanisms – by implementing aSMTP, SPF, DomainKeys or DKIM, we can publish the authenticity of our mails.

Refer here for a sample aSMTP mail

3. Use dedicated IPs to send emails

4. Implement a unique PTR record

5.  Do not retry failed addresses.

6. A Valid unsubscribe link

7. Your contents are important

– dont include any HTML forms, java script , embedded objects in your mail

– Use links to domain names , not to IPs.

These are the major steps we need to check before sending mass emails. If we follow this , I dont think we dont find our newsletters or any thing in the spam boxes

Courtesy: The Antispam policy of yahoo, gmail and many other major MSPs.

Tags: Antispam, domain key, email deliverability