Whether sending or receiving emails, there are best practices to allow for your emails to be successfully delivered to your recipient's inbox without being filtered out as spam by email providers.

• Use a recognizable sender name
• Subject lines
• Avoid spam content
• Checking your IP reputation
• SPF authentication
• Domain reputation
• Managing spam

Use a recognizable sender name

It is best to send emails from an email address that preferably contains your name with your brand name so that the recipients recognize you because in the sea of emails they receive every day, they have to choose which ones to open. People prefer to open those which include a personal name in the 'from' box rather than an impersonal, generic one.

Subject lines

A good subject line should contain between 30 and 50 characters (including spaces). Your email subject line should also create a sense of urgency while giving readers some indication of what to expect once they open the email.

Things you should avoid including while writing a subject:

• Spammy keywords (urgent, buy now, win, free)
• All uppercase letters
• Typos
• Overuse of emojis
• Deceptive subject lines that don't match the email content
• Avoid fonts and colours

Back to top

Avoid spam content

Whenever an email provider receives an email, the content is scanned to check for spam content. This filter looks for specific types of content that typically indicate spam. If you avoid adding the points below, you should easily pass through this step. 

• Writing in all caps
• Using too much punctuation (don't write ten exclamation points in a row!!!!!!)
• Using red font
• Overuse of spam words (free, cheap, pre-approved, $$$, 100% free, urgent, don't wait! etc.)
• HTML errors

Checking your IP reputation

If your IP address has a bad reputation in the virtual world, your targeted emails are more likely to land in the spam folder. The reputation of your IP address affects your email deliverability rates directly.

Specific tools, such as MxToolbox, let you check if you are a blacklisted sender.

All it takes is to enter the IP address or domain name in the box and click 'check.'

Back to top

SPF authentication

Authenticate your domain with an SPF record. The sender policy framework (SPF) is email authentication to prevent spammers from sending messages on your domain. 

The SPF records you need to enter are provided to you by your email hosting service. If Enom is your email provider, the following SPF record is automatically entered into your host records:

v=spf1 include:_spf.emfwd.name-services.com MX ?all

Domain reputation

ISPs track the reputation of individual sender domains. While the importance of sender domain reputation has increased, the IP pools used through your provider will still impact the deliverability of your content. This means your domain reputation is more important than ever and is your responsibility to maintain. Switching email providers or marketing automation platforms will not remove damage inflicted on your domain reputation due to poor sending. That damage will follow you regardless of which provider you choose.

Always take care to scan your site for malware or viruses. Often, this is what's behind getting you blacklisted. You might have a problem with the operating system, so make sure you repair any issues. Always perform updates as needed.

Managing spam

Clicking the spam button will move the message to the spam folder, and it sends information to the spam filtering engine so that the filtering rules can be updated to catch future similar spam messages. This helps update webmail filtering and improves it to reflect the current trends of spammers.

Legitimate emails can accidentally be tagged as spam. There are many reasons for this, including, but not limited to, message subject, content, or message routing, as mentioned above.

Any message that has been marked as spam and sent to your spam folder will be deleted after 30 days. For this reason, it is good practice to occasionally review the contents of your spam folder.

Back to top