How to get your enewsletter past spam filters

Jessica Albon publishes a free, weekly electronic newsletter for people who have electronic newsletters. It’s full of good advice, useful tips and common sense. A recent edition includes tips for getting news your readers want and you want them to have past the email filters that increasingly stand in the way.

Some readers have installed their own anti-spam software, such as Clear My Mail, while others have ISP-installed filters, like Spam Assassin or Cloudmark. In either case, many of the filters use a points-based system to determine whether a piece of email is spam. Email messages get points for certain words, phrases, design elements, colors, certain domain names, or being multi-part MIME email instead of HTML.

Programs also use blacklists based on emails submitted by the public. So, in figuring out how to keep your newsletter from being tagged spam, you want to look at both the human and computer elements the filters use.

To appear legitimate to readers, Albon suggests these tips:

• Be consistent. Readers are more likely to suspect a newsletter is spam if they haven't received it for awhile. Set a consistent schedule so readers are more likely to be familiar with it.
• Keep your promises. Clearly explain your newsletter on your subscribe form and honor your reader's expectations.
• Be professional and polite. Don't type in all capital letters and be careful with your spelling and grammar.
• Create a reassuring masthead. Include subscribing and unsubscribing instructions and a contact for help subscribing or unsubscribing.
• Don’t send it unsolicited.

To convince the computers not to filter you out:

• Use the right language. For instance, use unsubscribe instead of remove. Since most computer-based filters are based on a point system, each word you use needs to be carefully chosen.
• Stay far, far away from subject lines that scream spam. Don’t use phrases that cause you to delete an email unread. Apply your rules for reading subject lines to writing them.
• Don't send attachments. Attachments are suspicious to readers and some filters dump any email with an attachment, especially those set to screen out adult material and viruses.
• Use a reputable company for distribution. If you use an outside company to send email, don't use one with a domain that's blocked.
• Send both HTML and plain text versions. If you publish an HTML newsletter, consider sending each issue in a multi-part MIME format. When an HTML email message includes a plain text version, filters usually reduce the points the message has accumulated.
• Stay away from the wrong color schemes and design elements. See the spam in your inbox to notice trends, such as embedded images instead of linked images, red and green text and black backgrounds. Stick with a web safe palette.
• Use a tool to check your newsletter. SpamDance has a copy and paste form to use see how many points your newsletter has accumulated. SiteSell's system has you mail them the newsletter. Running an issue through a tool like these, you can fix problems before you click send.

Keep up to date with the latest changes to spam filters, Albon says. “You may discover the filters can actually be your allies. They keep you honest; they keep you creative; and, even better, they reduce the competition for your reader's time.”