Hygiene of mailing list or How not to get to spam?

No one even needs to ask a question “What is a spam email?” or “What are spammers?”. Everyone knows that spam is unexpected and annoying messages we haven’t agreed to receive, and spammers are the people who send them. But what to do if you try to grow your business sending interesting content newsletters or promotional emails, but they go to the Spam folder? From this article, you will find out the answers to the following questions:

• Why my email goes to spam?

• How to avoid being blacklisted for spam?

• How to stop emails going into junk?

Let’s start discussing these important issues.

Why are my emails going to spam?

The main reason for this is low quality of the address list. You can wonder how the risk of going to spam and email addresses are connected. Now we will explain this:

• First of all, spam filters react on the high bounce rate. If there are many newsletters that are not delivered you seem suspicious and can be blacklisted. The reason for this can be a high number of incorrect, fake, abandoned emails in the address book. We will talk about these types of emails in more detail further.

• Secondly, there are spam traps. These are the emails that are not used by real users and never subscribe to any mailings. If you send a newsletter to such an address you will be identified as a spammer by filters.

• Thirdly, some people can report an email as spam if you have the addresses of the users that don’t want to receive your messages. If filters see a lot of complaints they decide that you are email spamming and blacklist your domain.

So, you see that if there are bad addresses in the mailing list there is a high risk of being blocked for spam. And this problem is better to prevent than to solve. Once being blacklisted by a spam filter, it will be difficult to reanimate the reputation of your domain. So, let’s discuss how to avoid emails going to spam.

How to avoid spam filters: make an address list clean

Get rid of the following email in your database:

• Incorrect addresses. These are the addresses that are written with mistakes. For example, anna@gnail.com (there is a mistake in domain spelling: gnail.com instead of gmail.com). As the address is written incorrectly, the newsletter will never be delivered to it. And the spam filters will react negatively if there will be many undelivered emails.

• Fake emails. These are ones created in the generators. They look like a random set of letters or numbers like gkjhub5656@gmail.com. As the address doesn’t exist the newsletter will not be delivered and will be returned to the sender. This creates a high bounce rate that is suspicious for spam filters.

• Abandoned mailboxes. The addresses that are not used by owners during a long period of time are automatically deactivated and become nonexistent. Gmail.com blocks an email address after 270 days of it being not used. And there is a high risk of being blacklisted by Gmail spam filter if you keep on sending messages to the abandoned addresses. The most insidious thing is that abandoned addresses look like real ones. So, you can’t identify them by eye unlike the addresses with mistakes in domain spelling or fake ones.

• Spam traps. It also often looks like a real email address, but it is not used by a real person. These ones are always closely monitored by filters. And if someone sends a newsletter to such an address it looks like a typical spam picture for the filters. So, never send emails to the traps if you don’t want to be banned.

• Duplicates. These are two or more similar emails in the database. This can lead to sending two or more newsletters to the same address. So, a person can report an email as spam if there are several same newsletters.

• Service emails. These are the addresses like support@company.com. Such addresses often appear in parsed mailing lists. Sending promotional emails to them will not bring any positive effect and will look suspicious for spam filters.

All these bad emails can be found by Atomic Email Verifier. This is a program for checking if addresses are valid. It verifies them in three steps by checking the following things:

1. Syntax correctness. This helps to get rid of the incorrectly written addresses at once.

2. Domain existence. It’s logically that if a domain doesn’t exist then the address doesn’t exist too. So, a program checks if there is such a domain.

3. Possibility of an address to receive emails. The program connects to a server to check this. This helps to say for sure if the address is existent and can receive the newsletters.

Once you have verified the emails with the help of Atomic Email Verifier you have got rid of all types of bad emails.

Also, delete the addresses of the people who have unsubscribed from your mailing. You can set the process of removing them from the contact list automatically.

We have already discussed what ingredients shouldn’t be in the address book for avoiding spam filters. But what to do if you are already blacklisted for spam?

How to stop emails going into junk?

First of all, if your newsletters are constantly getting to spam check if you are really blacklisted. There are specialized servers for this. For instance, Debouncer. It checks if your domain or IP address is banned. What to do next i f you find out that you are really blacklisted:

• Contact the support of the mail provider to get the detailed instructions on how to be removed from the black list.

• If you have no time to wait until being removed, send emails from another domain or use a proxy to hide the IP of a sender.

• Don’t repeat old mistakes. For no more being blocked for spam in email marketing campaigns make your address list clean before launching the next one.

Atomic Email Verifier will find all the bad addresses and help you to create a clean contact list for email marketing. Download a program and check out its features for free for 7 days!

Written by:

Tatiana Pyrih