Be streetwise to get the message home

You can't just give your emails a packed lunch and clean pants and send them out into the wilds of the internet. It's tough on the web, and emails need to be pretty streetwise to negotiate all the obstacles between them and a reader's inbox.

If it's a Hotmail inbox, for example, your message will have to survive interrogation by up to four different filters. Many ISPs take such measures to protect their subscribers from junk, but legitimate business communications are often wrongly tarnished as spam and blocked from being delivered.

The problem is even worse where corporate gateways have been deployed. StoneShot conducted internal email campaigns for two big corporates in the telecommunications industry. Despite the creative being approved by them, and the email being from one part of the company to another part of the same company, the corporate gateway blocked the messages.

Gateway software like MIMEsweeper is easily configurable, which results in each company's gateway having a different personality. It will reflect the type of spam they have received in the past, but will often have been adapted without sufficient thought for what might be misclassified as junk. We've seen test copy get blocked because some innocent Latin words look rude in English.

Consumer ISPs cooperate with each other to fight spam and usually provide a mechanism for users to review spam and report any that were mistakenly spiked. Corporate gateways don't have this safety valve, though, so unless you make sure your messages are getting through, they could end up being deleted before anyone sees them.

Here's a six step plan for improving your deliverability:

1. Send something of value
Yahoo says that if messages are wrongly classified as spam, users are quick to alert them. If you're sending useful, entertaining or valuable messages, your recipients will lobby their email provider to make sure your messages get through.

2. Avoid spam-like messages
Easier said than done because today's antispam systems use a vast number of parameters to estimate whether an email might be spam or not, and tot up a probability based on that. That said, sending pictures without any text isn't a good start. Ask us for advice on getting the balance right.

3. Test everything
Run your email through a border gateway product like MIMEsweeper to see what traits of your message might be misconstrued as indicating spam. Get a clean assessment from your test gateway before trying to send your message through real gateways.

4. Monitor bounces
Look for trends in the bounces to see if a particular ISP or company is blocking your email.

5. Manage removals
Spam is in the eye of the beholder. If someone no longer needs your messages, honour their removal request promptly. If you don't, they'll add you to their spam filters and you risk the ISP blocking all your future messages. Take off persistent bounces too - some ISPs will consider you a spammer if you send email to too many invalid addresses.

6. Form alliances
Contact ISPs and companies who are blocking your email and ask to be whitelisted. Remember, their customers have asked to receive your communications and they have no right to stop them getting through. Many ISPs publish tips on getting messages delivered to their customers and procedures for accrediting bulk emailers. See, for example, AOL's postmaster pages, Hotmail's postmaster pages and Yahoo's mail FAQ. The challenge of deliverability is another reason why more and more companies are working with email marketing specialists like StoneShot. We have established relationships with major ISPs and are known as a reputable bulk emailer.

If you'd like to talk about how we can get your messages delivered, call us on 020 7628 4444.