Hulp nodig?

Introduction: how does spam work?

When you send a mail to the post office it (hopefully) arrives in someone's mailbox.
The mailbox contains anti-spam instructions in the form of  'No advertisments' stickers being put on it.
Your mailman plays a big roll in this: namely that he is reponsible for following the instructions.

 

In the digital world of e-mails this works the other way around. The mailman is your mailprovider (ESP for short - this can be Google (Gmail) or Microsoft (Outlook)).
Your mail arrives in a digital mailbox. This mailbox is protected by a third-party (the ESP of the recipient) instead of stickers.
In this case the responsibility to follow the anti-spam instructions lies with the recipient's ESP.

We do not control what anti-spam measures the recipient's ESP is using or that they will follow the instructions.
The only way to be sure that your mails do not get received as spam is by gaining the trust of the recipient's ESP.
This so called "trust" is expressed in the form of a 'Reputation Score' that is connected to the domain used for sending mails.

 

Why do mails get received in the spam folder?

Your mails can end up in the spam folder because of 2 reasons:

• The mailprovider (ESP) of the recipient uses an algorithm that marks your mail as spam.
• The recipient manually put your mail in spam.

 

How does this algorithm work? 

The spam filter algorithm of an ESP analyzes your mail, The most looked at content is the following:

• Which domain is being used to send mails.
• How many mails you've already sent using this domain.
• How many mails you are trying to send at once.
• What application is being used to send the mails.
• How many received mails did the recipient actually receive.
• Is there a Sender Policy Framework-Record (SPF for short) for your domain? This record has the purpose of lessening the mails that get marked as spam. (Find more info about SPF here)
• The content of your mails gets checked, this includes things like the layout. a mail that only contains an image without any text will be more likely to get marked as spam for example.

By using all of this collected data the algorithm will allocate a spam score. 

Your reputation score gets rechecked every day. This means there is a chance for you to temporarily appear on a spamlist if you every use your mailbox to send out mails for a promotional campagne to a large group of people for instance.

If this is a recurring issue for you it is recommended to use a third-party service that specializes in email marketing (like Mailchimp)

 

What can i do to find out the reason behind my low spam score?

All this information gets encrypted in every mail. This is called an 'e-mail header'. These automatically get created when you send a mail and gets updated after every step this mail takes to get to the recipient's mailbox.

Ask the receiver of one of your spam mails to send it back. The mail header of this mail wil give us more insight to why this mail got marked as spam.

 

 

A different method to check the deliverability of your mails is using the mail-tester service.

 

 

Concrete steps that you can take to better the deliverability of your mail?

How the recipient handles your mail has a direct and important impact on your reputation score as sender.

If the receiver has marked your mail as read this will be enough to up your reputation score.

• Ask the receiver(s) to take your mails out of spam and mark them as read.
• Ask the receiver(s) to add your mail address to their whitelist.
• Send us a mail-tester report so that we can look into it further (see the part above this one to find the steps on how to do so).