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How to figure out why your emails are getting delivered to spam

How to figure out why your emails are getting delivered to spam

Jeremy Schoemaker October 11, 2012

This is a guide I have put together for people who have newsletter lists or communicate with customers.  Its not at all a guide for any sort of mass email deployers (spammers).

Over the last 2 months or so I have written over 250+ emails for our PAR clients.

Most of our clients have us handle everything from A-Z in the setup and sequencing.

One of the things we do is test every email whether we write it or not to make sure it gets inboxed by all the major email providers.

I now have a ton of experience and wanted to share what I have learned and hopefully it will help you no matter if you are just getting started or already have emails going out.

Now I know what some of you are thinking…. my Aweber or other email provider already scores these emails for me to determine if they are spammy…

These providers rely on a spam analyzer called spamassasin or other general spam analyzing programs.  These can be helpful but I have rarely found them detecting spam on things that goto spam folders.   These programs used to be effective but over the years spammers use them also and get around the same rules… so major email providers do not trust  them anymore.

Ok lets get started:

Setting up testing accounts

If you just want to do a quick and dirty testing you can just send to your email.  But I highly recommend doing the following.

First thing you need to do is setup an account with all the major providers.

Accounts that are a must:

  • Hotmail
  • Yahoo
  • Gmail
  • AOL

Even if you already have these setup new ones.  Try to use some sort of identifier when you signup like testingmylist@yahoo.com or whatever.

Once you have setup all of them setup 1 more that is going to be your primary detection account.  Then setup the others to auto forward to that account.  This way when you test to those accounts they will goto a primary all in one spot. I recommend using a gmail account.

You should switch this account every 6 months or so.  Reason being is that I have found Gmail works a little differently and starts to develop a trust on items that are being delivered.  So something that was not marked as spam in the past could be getting through to you only because you have received many emails already from that address.

With PAR we setup over 70 of the top major email providers but just doing those top 4 is probably enough.  We find that if we can reliably get past spam filters on those then its pretty much 100% deliverability to the others.

My emails are going to spam on a provider.  Help!

Ok the first thing I do is take out the template (if you have one).  Resend and see if it goes through.

Do you have any weird charectors in the subject line?  If so take them out.  If that does not work try a different subject line.. something just for testing like “About our meeting” whatever just see if it goes through.

Take out the signature.  I know as weird as it sounds just trust me.  Even though this might go through on a bunch of other emails I have found that this in connection with other words in your email can trip filters.

If all else fails start to decompose the message.  Take out the first half… test.  Did it go through?  No – then put it back and put in the second half.

One you have isolated the paragraph or section just go sentence by sentence until you figure it out.

It really sucks sometimes but spending 10 minutes on a email is well worth it!

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About The Author

Jeremy Schoemaker

Jeremy "ShoeMoney" Schoemaker is the founder & CEO of ShoeMoney Media Group, and to date has sold 6 companies and done over 10 million in affiliate revenue. In 2013 Jeremy released his #1 International Best selling Autobiography titled "Nothing's Changed But My Change" - The ShoeMoney Story. You can read more about Jeremy on his wikipedia page here.

24 Comments

  1. Al

    Seems like a lot of work

    October 11, 2012
    • faisal

      Yeah, quite a lot!

      October 11, 2012
  2. Pingback: How To Keep Your Follow Up Emails Out Of The Spam Box
    October 11, 2012
  3. Brice

    HATE SPAM

    October 11, 2012
  4. Isiah

    I have never tested my emails a lot. hmmm my bad :/

    October 11, 2012
  5. kj rocker

    thanks for your tips IMO majority of people do use gmail and i would agree with your gmail`s trust thing .

    October 11, 2012
  6. Michale

    A trick I found was that if the subject line is too long this will trigger spam

    October 11, 2012
  7. Charley

    You know another thing I found is that it can also trigger is who the email is coming from

    October 11, 2012
  8. Emmanuel

    You really think different images or templates will trigger spam filters? Does this happen even if it is from a reliable source?

    October 11, 2012
  9. Rory

    I always write the emails first and then test them with the same subject line to see if it is the email content first.

    October 11, 2012
  10. Nathaniel

    What other email accounts should we test beside the major ones? I know people use like earthlink still and outlook

    October 11, 2012
  11. Denny

    Wow! great post Jeremy this is something that I know I do not do for testing. I will take your advice. Thanks for the value

    October 11, 2012
  12. Jayson

    Great guide thanks!

    October 11, 2012
  13. Gilberto

    Really line by line… i guess it is kinda worth it if you are selling something

    October 11, 2012
  14. Cary

    Great value Shoe! I think everyone who is mailing needs to test. It is really important and I feel like a lot of people leave this step out

    October 11, 2012
  15. Craig

    So weird how even people who I am working with send me mail and their email goes to spam. Why would this happen?

    October 11, 2012
  16. Dean Saliba

    It does seem like a lot of work but I think most of us will be happy to do it if the end result means more people looking at our emails and potentially buying our products. 🙂

    I would like to know how to permanently ban some email addresses from coming to me from some domains, I don’t mean go into junk folder, I mean stop them from getting to me.

    October 11, 2012
  17. Michelle

    Well worth the work, especially considering how much time and effort is generally spent on the creative.

    October 12, 2012
  18. Darwin

    Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.

    October 12, 2012
  19. Felipe

    Thanks for the tips man!

    October 12, 2012
  20. Mac

    Agreed its a lot of work, however you waste more time by not doing it. Think about it, if it goes to spam well then it was a complete waste of time a resources. Just take your time and do it right.

    October 12, 2012
  21. purposeinc

    It is funny, no matter how long I study this stuff, you bring up things I never thought of. Email deliverability seriously seemed very complex, but the simple catching accounts for each provider forwarded to the gmail is so fricken simple.

    Smart.

    October 13, 2012
    • Earl Grey

      I know
      The forwarding saves me logging into so many emails now to check and i would have never thought of that.
      So simple now its being pointed out though.
      Facepalm moment

      October 13, 2012
  22. superwoman

    Hi Jeremy,

    a related problem is using a service like anonym.to to redirect your links.

    Every time I get an email from **pro marketers** who use anonym.to, I have to go out of my way to get to the linked to site because my anti-virus program prevents me from going to anonym.to as it is classified as harmful. I bet that many people wouldn’t do that. You have to really, really trust a site to ignore such a warning.

    I don’t know why so many marketers are now using anonym.to, but because they do (and there are black sheep among them), anonym.to apparently got blacklisted. I guess that defeats the purpose.

    It seems to me that one problem we are facing is to find services (like mailing list services) that are clean and stay clean. Thoughts?

    Thanks for all your help!

    October 23, 2012
  23. Satur

    Every morning I wake up and I have over 800 messages in my box, and I have not really absolutely no ideas of where they come from, i was reading this article and in truth helped me a bit, I try to see if I can do it, but it looks as much work. I’ll try, but I wanted to thank because I learned a lot with this article and think it is going to be the solution to my problem, thank you very much.

    October 24, 2012
  24. Pingback: Hot New Internet Products April 29th – May 3rd. – ShoeMoney …
    May 4, 2013

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