Stop our emails ending up in spam...
Discussion
Just wondering if anyone can offer me some advice?
Through work we often send out emails to customer who have dealt with us at our branches to approve artwork or to give out quotes etc. We do not send out advertising or any other kind of spam within these emails but more often than not, our emails will end up in the customers spam or junk inbox and we've found that most people don't even realise they have a spam or junk inbox, let alone check it on a regular basis...
So, is there anything we can do about this? It seems to be the big email providers that we have the most problems with. Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo etc. They all seem to have overactive spam filers and for some reason, our totally innocent emails get picked up as spam.
An example of one of our emails would be as follows :
Subject : Canvas Hut Order Preview
Content : Hi customer, thanks for uploading your image to us. We've taken a look at your file and the quality will be ok for printing from. There will be some cropping from the top and bottom of the image but nothing that takes away from the image as a while. The cost for your order will be £xx.xx with the total needing to be paid before we can print your order. Please give us a call on xxxxx xxxxxx to make payment or visit us at the branch where we can take payment and have the order ready within an hour. Thanks.
There will then usually be a simple jpg image attached (under 100kb).
So, what can we do to stop our emails going to spam inboxes? It's really bloody frustrating...
Through work we often send out emails to customer who have dealt with us at our branches to approve artwork or to give out quotes etc. We do not send out advertising or any other kind of spam within these emails but more often than not, our emails will end up in the customers spam or junk inbox and we've found that most people don't even realise they have a spam or junk inbox, let alone check it on a regular basis...
So, is there anything we can do about this? It seems to be the big email providers that we have the most problems with. Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo etc. They all seem to have overactive spam filers and for some reason, our totally innocent emails get picked up as spam.
An example of one of our emails would be as follows :
Subject : Canvas Hut Order Preview
Content : Hi customer, thanks for uploading your image to us. We've taken a look at your file and the quality will be ok for printing from. There will be some cropping from the top and bottom of the image but nothing that takes away from the image as a while. The cost for your order will be £xx.xx with the total needing to be paid before we can print your order. Please give us a call on xxxxx xxxxxx to make payment or visit us at the branch where we can take payment and have the order ready within an hour. Thanks.
There will then usually be a simple jpg image attached (under 100kb).
So, what can we do to stop our emails going to spam inboxes? It's really bloody frustrating...
Anything with an attachment that isnt a zip file can be an issue these days. we have a client who sends out lots of xls files and its a mare trying to stop them ending up in spam.
Just wait till you hit the outlook.com/hotmail silent disgard where if they dont like a mail it just gets binned, no putting it in spam, or bouncing just gets deleted before it hits the recipient
Just wait till you hit the outlook.com/hotmail silent disgard where if they dont like a mail it just gets binned, no putting it in spam, or bouncing just gets deleted before it hits the recipient
Oh I've pretty sure we've come up against that a number of times already. Customers insisting they never received an email, nothing in spam etc. Yet we have it sat there in our sent box along with numerous follow up emails...
Zip is no issue for us but would be for a lot of our customers who likely pick up and review the emails on their phones and zip files aren't usually compatible without an app to open it.
Zip is no issue for us but would be for a lot of our customers who likely pick up and review the emails on their phones and zip files aren't usually compatible without an app to open it.
Here is what I would recommend:
- Go here to request that your IP is removed from the LashBack blacklist http://blacklist.lashback.com/
- Add an SPF record to you domain
- Send auto generated and marketing emails through a 3rd party such as mandrill or sendgrid (their IP addresses will have much better reputation)
The jpg will not be helping, there was a period when lots of spam was being sent as an image of text instead of raw text, so you are probably falling foul of the filters they put in to stop that kind of spam. Assuming the jpg is some kind of proof so it can't just be dropped, maybe see if there is another way it could be delivered to the customer e.g. some kind of dropbox-like link to it instead of being an attachment. Or a different kind of attachment but not PDF as they seem to be the malware spreader's attachment of choice these days so will get blocked as well.
SPF may help.
Ensure you have reverse DNS in place.
Keep on top of RBLs - you may only be on "a couple" but if those include spamcop or spamhaus you're basically f
ked until you get off them.
How are you sending mail are you doing direct delivery or is it going via a smarthost?
Keep in mind it could be as simple as it looks spammy so it's being flagged as spam - that said I can count on one hand how many false positives I've had with Gmail in all the years of using them.
Ensure you have reverse DNS in place.
Keep on top of RBLs - you may only be on "a couple" but if those include spamcop or spamhaus you're basically f
ked until you get off them.How are you sending mail are you doing direct delivery or is it going via a smarthost?
Keep in mind it could be as simple as it looks spammy so it's being flagged as spam - that said I can count on one hand how many false positives I've had with Gmail in all the years of using them.
Thanks for the advice and sorry for the late reply. Forgot I even started this topic.
A lot of the above suggested actions are out of my reach. Although we maintain the website ourselves (via a CMS), we don't host it ourselves or have any access to any of the server side stuff. We don't even have FTP access to the webspace so really restricted on what I can actually do.
We've got in touch with the service providers so hopefully it's something they will be able to sort for us without too much fuss...
We're also looking at linking the customer to an externally hosted image now rather than sending the Jpg directly and I've also applied to have us removed from the black lists we flag up on.
As a few people asked, we never send advertising directly. We use mailchimp for any marketing emails.
A lot of the above suggested actions are out of my reach. Although we maintain the website ourselves (via a CMS), we don't host it ourselves or have any access to any of the server side stuff. We don't even have FTP access to the webspace so really restricted on what I can actually do.
We've got in touch with the service providers so hopefully it's something they will be able to sort for us without too much fuss...
We're also looking at linking the customer to an externally hosted image now rather than sending the Jpg directly and I've also applied to have us removed from the black lists we flag up on.
As a few people asked, we never send advertising directly. We use mailchimp for any marketing emails.
If you really start with "Hi customer" - change it. "will be ok" is also a bit close to some of the classic fraudster phrases.
Generic greetings & phrases like that tend to trigger anti-phishing filters. Make it specific to the person/company you're dealing with and it will get a better score.
Generic greetings & phrases like that tend to trigger anti-phishing filters. Make it specific to the person/company you're dealing with and it will get a better score.
We've had the same issue. I've been toying with the idea of creating an online proofing system. Ie, I upload the file to our website, a unique url is generated, email that to the customer and then let them view proofs online maybe with some functionality to submit annotations / amendments.
Oakey said:
We've had the same issue. I've been toying with the idea of creating an online proofing system. Ie, I upload the file to our website, a unique url is generated, email that to the customer and then let them view proofs online maybe with some functionality to submit annotations / amendments.
Sounds like a great idea and something we have thought about but our current website simply doesn't support anything like that. It would still involve an email to the customer though, which they probably wouldn't get
It looks like some of the main Gotchas are sorted now
http://www.dnsinspect.com/canvashut.com/1436453303
Are you still having problems getting emails delivered? Is the mail server a shared hosted one at your domain registrars or somewhere else? You're with Heart Internet from the looks of it. Their support is very very good, ask them if they can help make email more deliverable for you
http://www.dnsinspect.com/canvashut.com/1436453303
Are you still having problems getting emails delivered? Is the mail server a shared hosted one at your domain registrars or somewhere else? You're with Heart Internet from the looks of it. Their support is very very good, ask them if they can help make email more deliverable for you
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