by Wendy Connick

Created on: May 31, 2008

The proliferation of spam in everyone's email has resulted in an equal proliferation of spam-fighting devices. From software to filter services to appliances, just about everyone has some kind of spam blocker running on their email.

That's great for the average user, but what do you do if you want to send out a marketing communication? You really don't want to spend hours slaving over your company newsletter, only to find out after hitting Send that half the copies ended up in someone's junk mail folder.

Happily, you can take steps to ensure that your communications arrive at their desired destination, rather than being blitzed by an overeager spam blocker.

The easiest way to keep your mass mailings from being flagged as spam is not to send them. No, I don't mean shutting down your email marketing program. Instead of sending out mass emails, have an email marketing company send them out for you. Not only will they help you craft your marketing pieces so as to avoid spamminess, they'll also help you to stay within the bounds of legality. The US government has issued several laws (most notably the CAN-SPAM Act) to legislate email marketing. If you've been sending out mass mailings and the phrases double opt-in, unsolicited bulk email and permission-based mailing mean nothing to you, then you may be heading for serious legal trouble. An email marketing company can manage those pesky legal issues for you.

If you prefer to send out mass mailings yourself, the first step is to verify that your IP address is not on any blacklists. If you have a dynamic IP address (meaning that your Internet Service Provider randomly assigns you an IP every time you connect to the internet) then there is a fairly high chance that one or more of your IP addresses has been used by a spammer at some point and is now blacklisted. There are several free tools available on the Internet that can check the major blacklists for your IP address; http://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx is one of them. Don't know what your IP address is? Go to http://www.whatismyip.com and find out. If your IP address does show up on a blacklist, immediately contact the list's administrator and petition for removal.

Next, glance over your email to see if it contains any spammy-sounding words or phrases. The subject line is particularly important, as most spam filters give a lot of weight to a message's subject. If your subject line is something like, "GREAT INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITY!" you are going to trip a lot of spam filters. Essentially you want to avoid using all caps, multiple exclamation marks and any salesy-sounding words, particularly in the subject line. Other phrases to avoid include 'viagra,' 'replica watches,' 'pharmaceuticals,' and any words that you wouldn't hear in a Disney movie.

Finally, be careful what images you post in your emails. Last year's surge in image-based spam galvanized most spam-blocking companies into adding optical character recognition (OCR) software into their filters. OCRs can "read" images and form judgments as to their contents, so a questionable image or two can tip the balance far enough to get your messages flagged as spam.

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