Deliverability: Making it Through to the Inbox

Often customers will ask me the following question.

Some of my recipients tell me they are receiving their mail in their Spam folder. What can I do to assist delivery to their in-boxes?

There are numerous SPAM firewalls being used by incoming mail servers today, many having much different scoring algorithms. The same content scored as legitimate by SPAM firewall brand X may be scored by SPAM firewall brand Y as SPAM. Moreover, the same SPAM firewall brand X can often be configured by the IT Admin to score incoming content with more sensitivity.

Here are a few things you, as the customer, can do to influence receiving mail servers to deliver your mail to your recipients' in-boxes.

First and foremost, make sure you are sending to a clean list. Delivery reputation follows a customer like credit history follows all of us.
Publish an SPF record. Publishing an SPF record is easy to do and will tell receiving servers you are a reputable and trusted sender.
Make your content less "SPAMMY" by removing words that are known to trigger SPAM firewalls. Run your Delivra mailing through our SPAM Analysis tool (we use Spam Assassin). It may not catch every phrase that will trigger every SPAM firewall out there but it will catch the obvious ones.
Authenticate your sending domain using Domain Keys and Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM). Authenticating your domain will help especially with delivery to Yahoo in-boxes.

You've contracted Delivra to help you create a good looking mailing and get that mailing delivered to your recipients' servers. We promise to do our part. Follow the above advice and you will see increased delivery to your recipients' in-boxes.

Todd Weymouth | Customer Support