Is your newsletter considered junk too ?

[yanuart]

Hi guys, I just tested my new mass mail script for my newsletter. After the test I just found out that hotmail/yahoo considered my newsletter mail as junk/spam and therefore goes straight to the junk mailbox a.k.a oblivion.
Considering that 90% of my newsletter subscriber uses hotmail/yahoo or any other free email service, I'm starting to wonder about the efficieny of my newsletter.
Is there something I can do to let my mail go through ? Do I need to change my script, add certain code in the mail header or what ? I'm not a web/network wiz but I'm willing to learn.Btw, Hotmail pretty much blocks everything, even my directxdev mailing list mail (which is come from MS too, go figure.. sigh)

[Olivier]

An good way to measure your newsletter's efficiency is to do some tracking. You can write your own system but it would be easier to use Google Analytics or something similar.

I'm using GA and I've had an amazingly low click rate with the latest issue of my newsletter. I'm using YMLP and a bunch of subscribers use freemails, must have gone to junk folder.
I wonder if this has something to do with the 'From' field. Next time I'll simply leave my sender's address and see the results.

[Indiepath]

We track our newsletters through our own system on IGB, I can then get stats like who bounced, who opened the email, who unsubscribed and who clicked through. And since our subscribers need to confirm via a double-opt-in system we can pretty much be sure that our newsletters emails are getting to them. The stat's back that up.

[jefferytitan]

Our company has a mail product which we built from scratch, and a decent number of clients using it. From my experience I'd say that there's a few reasons that often crop up:

- dodgy looking subject/copy, i.e. many exclamation marks or banned words
- SMTP server has no domain, a different domain to the from address, etc
- links in email say they go to one domain, but go to another
- scripting in the HTML, i.e. javascript/vbscript
- subject/from address aren't obvious, user junks it themselves

There are sites which will tell you the spam score for various spam filters. I can't remember any off-hand, but give it a try.

[Anthony Flack]

Regular email is almost useless these days, with the volume of spam being trucked around (I frequently miss real messages from real people I know). Mailing lists must fare very badly.

Such a shame, because these people did sign up to get a newsletter, they are interested in what you do, but the chances are increasingly slight that they'll ever get the message.

Imagine email with no spam. Mailing lists would be great. Leave it up to people to ruin something as simple and brillianty useful as email.

(er, any info on how to avoid spam filters would be appreciated).

[arcadetown]

My best tip (and perhaps only) is avoid any wording that feels spammy like free, offer, bonus, survey, etc.