Now that more of us are working from home, email communication is more important than ever and the last thing you need is for your message to be rejected or flagged as spam. So how do you avoid this? Well, this blog aims to give you tips and advice to avoid mistakes that commonly trigger spam filtering in most email services.
For person to person sending
Ensuring your email doesn’t look like a scam, begins with the subject line. Where possible, you should avoid using too much punctuation (especially exclamation points and question marks) and write a subject line that is relevant to the content of your email. Words that can trigger spam filters include “free”, “urgent” and “guaranteed”, particularly if your subject line is in all capitals. If you need to get across the urgency of an email, you should instead use the “high importance” button.
Moving on to the email itself, you should start with a personalised greeting as generic salutations make your content more likely to appear unsolicited.
Avoid using shortened URL’s (spammers utilise this to mask the true destination of a false link) and replacing letters with symbols in your words (for example “@ccounts”, “|egislature”). Topics which are highly recognised as spam include medications, prescription drugs and financial institutions, so these should be referenced sparingly.
Be sure any attachments you send are named and spelled correctly and chose a name that is simple and specific to the attachment.
Bulk Email Sending
We recommend you don’t use your council email for bulk sending to more that 50 people as it flags your account as spam. There are many alternative services and websites that allow you to safely send high-volume email, which will have features built in to help with email list hygiene, recipient opt-in and unsubscribe management. (check out our blog on mass sending: https://visionict.com/Make_Sending_Mass_Emails_Easier.aspx)
Regularly updating your email lists ensures that they are accurate and that you aren’t sending mail to people who have opted out. Do not use paid for lists or send emails to large numbers of invalid recipients, as this is a clear indicator as spam. If our service providers suspect you of spamming, your email will be blacklisted and blocked for a certain amount of time. If this is happening to you regularly, it could be a sign you need to sign up to a bulk email service instead.
You also need to provide an option for recipients to opt-out of your mailing list. Following confirmed opt-in practices when collating mailing lists will reduce the chances of your email being considered unsolicited. If too may recipients mark your emails as spam for being unsolicited, then you are more likely to be flagged as a spammer by email content filters.