In this tutorial I will tell you how to check the quality level of the emails you send from your domain, to check if they are considered SPAM.
Emails that do not reach their destination
Every week I receive the occasional email from cases of emails that do not reach their destination, and are filtered to SPAM, either at the level of the email manager itself, or the server itself. Here’s the last one that came to me, yesterday:
Right now all the projects, both of my clients and mine, are in the same VPS hosting. The alarm went off yesterday, when a client alerts me that the emails he sends enter the recipient’s spam in hotmail. I have already tried with 4 or 5 domains that I have hosted on my server to send emails to hotmail and they ALL go into spam.
After this, I open a ticket with my hosting provider about this incident and in summary, they tell me that on the one hand it is due to the hotmail spam filters and that it is a matter of time before this is solved “by itself” and on the other that the server has nothing to do, that we can also get in touch with hotmail blaming the domain.
In conclusion, Joan, and from your experience, I just need you to tell me that you believe, that I should believe what they tell me or is it that indeed everything that goes out of my server to hotmail goes into spam and is the fault of the provider that is throwing balls out
Indeed, Hotmail sometimes goes a bit far when it comes to preventing SPAM, and can sometimes give false positives. But be careful, because he is not the only one. It can also happen with the client application itself, or even with Gmail. Hence, I always recommend checking the SPAM folder periodically, to make sure that no legitimate email has slipped through.
When any of these filters “crosses the line” it is best to report this false positive to the person responsible for it. In Gmail, for example, by checking the “This is not SPAM” box. As many users do the same, little by little and over time, everything returns to normal.
But what can we do until then? How can we improve the quality of our emails, to avoid them being considered SPAM as much as possible? Well, improving our note. What note? Let’s see it!
Check the quality score of your emails
Nowadays we have several tools that allow us to do this, but my favorite is without a doubt, from the folks at MailPoet. Surely you already know this great plugin. If not, take a look at .
It is a very easy to use tool, translated into Spanish, and also free, meaning that you cannot ask for more. The home page couldn’t be more simple and explanatory, take a look:
As you can see, it is simple and direct. It gives you a random email address, to which you should send any email. You can do this in many ways, but the most typical are three alternatives:
- From your email manager: Send a normal email to that address, with the subject and text you want.
- From your mailing manager: Send a “test” email from your newsletter. All the tools (MailChimp, MailPoet, MailRelay, etc.) have that option.
- From your website: Send an email from your website through a form or a CMS like WordPress.
Since the first two options don’t have any secrets, we’ll continue this example with the third option. We are going to send an email from WordPress. There are many ways to do that, but one of the easiest and fastest is to create a new user with that email. In this way, you will receive a confirmation email with your password.
Above all, let’s make sure to have the option “Send notice to the user” activated, because that is precisely what it is about. To send the new user an email with information about their account. It is also important to give it a subscriber role. Don’t give him any more privileges, just in case.
Next, we will wait a few seconds, to make sure that the mail arrives (meanwhile we can take the opportunity to delete that test user)and then we will return to Mail Tester, and we will click on the blue button:
We wait a few seconds, and tachán! Here is my note:
In other words, you can already be content and happy with our outstanding, because your emails are going to reach everywhere. Congratulations!
Otherwise, you will see something similar to this:
With this gloomy and pessimistic message (with rain included) Mail Tester tells us that our mail is most likely not going to reach its destination. O disgust! What do we do now?
How to prevent your emails from going to SPAM
Well, if you have failed, don’t worry, because everything has a solution in this world. In fact, the same tool already tells us why we have failed, and what we can improve. And it does so in a broken down and detailed way, below the result:
As you can see, there are several criteria that make up that note, and we can display each of those points, to find out what the problem is, and how to solve it. The five categories are:
- Message
- User rating for SpammAssassin
- permissions
- Message body
- black lists
So, going back to the email that came to me, what should be done is look at those points and see the origin of the problem. There we will see if “the fault” is the mail server, the hosting, the domain, the CMS, or the mail itself.
From here, fixing each of these points is already material for another tutorial. Or for several of them. Or even a whole coursesince each problem requires a very different solution.
In other words, if you want me to take a course to solve each of these points and add it to the , let me know, and if there is interest, I will do so, delighted.
Summary and conclusion
Sometimes, our emails may not reach their destination because they are considered SPAM, despite not being so. In that case, we must check our note, and detect where we are losing points.
Tools like Mail Tester will help us to know our points to improve in an easy and simple way, and they will even tell us how to improve.
If you want to learn more about emails, email marketing, web development and online marketing in general, take a look at my , where I cover that and much more. 🙂
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