New Spam Rules Blocking Your Email?

We have been contacted by several clients because their emails are being blocked or sent to junk mail folders. If you are not receiving emails or if your emails are not being received, you may want to read these tips for avoiding the new anti-spam filters.

Websites and internet service providers work hard to filter the billions of spam messages sent every day. Recently, Google, AOL, Macafee and a few other anti-spam software companies updated their software, leaving many of our legitimate emails undelivered or redirected to the junk mail folder. Here are 5 things you need to do today to make sure your emails get delivered.

1. URLs & Text Mismatch – It is very common for people to have links to their website in email signatures. Often, the link text and the URL don’t match exactly. For example, https://grapeinc.com/ is the URL and GrapeInc.com is the text. The fact that the URL and the link text are just a little bit different can trigger the anti-spam filters.
2. ALL CAPS – NOBODY LIKES BEING SCREAMED AT.  Using all capital letters is not only considered rude, it increases the chances your emails will be blocked.
3. Marketing Jargon – Words like free, especially written in all capitals, and phrases like limited time offer trigger the “promotional email” feature of GMail and increases the spam score of your emails.
4. “From” & “Reply-To” Matching – The email address you send from should match the reply-to address. For example, don’t send emails from you@yourdomain.com and set the reply-to address to you@gmail.com.
5. Mail Servers – Check to make sure you are using the right email server. Some email servers will let you send emails claiming to be someone else. This is called spoofing. Make sure the email server you use to send email matches your email address. For example, our @grapeinc.com emails are sent from our mail server mail.grapeinc.com. We also set SPF DNS records to tell other mail servers that ONLY our mail server is allowed to send emails from @grapeinc.com addresses. That way, spammers claiming to be us can be blocked when they send emails claiming to be from us while using their own email servers.

Still having problems sending emails?  You will need to talk to your mail server administrator, usually your host, to see if they can help. Server admins have many tools at their disposal to track emails and diagnose problems.