Will spam filters stop others getting my e-mail?
Spam filters make mistakes. They can classify perfectly legitimate mail as spam. And you may find the mail you send is never read by its intended recipient as it is blocked by their spam filter. What can you do?
Avoid certain words and phrases
Spam filters look out for certain words and phrases. If your message is laden with them, then the recipient's spam filter may weed out your mail. So your attempt to tell your customers that your latest investment portfolio is "not a get-rich scheme" may still fall foul of the filters that miss that vital word not.Spam filtes work on statistics rather than simple rules. A single "get-rich quick" phrase will be allowed to pass. But if the e-mail also has other key phrases, the spam score will slowly build up.
Be careful when using your own PC for mass mailings
You can buy software for running your own mass-marketing campaigns. You can build up a database of your customers and send out a mailing to thousands. And with broadband, it costs no more than a single e-mail.There are two ways of doing this distribution. You can send all your many messages to your ISP's mail server to deliver on your behalf. This will work well, provided you do not cross any restrictions, such as limits on the number of e-mails you can send in a hour. These restrictions may be there to protect you! For example, Ambit New Media watches the rate of distribution of e-mails in case your computer is hijaked and is being used by a spammer to send out thousands of e-mails. If this happens, not only will your business be tarnished but Ambit New Media's mail servers may be blacklisted as a source of spam. So stopping suspicious mailings can be very helpful.
Some mass-mailing software will bypass your ISP's mail server and send the mail directly to the recipients. It acts as its own mail server. This is the second approach to mass mailing. However attractive this may appear, it may be a quick way to get your e-mail rejected by others. Many receiving mail servers will check that the domain name of the sending computer corresponds to the its actual computer addres (its IP address) on the Internet. So if you set up your mass-mailing software to send out mail over, say, a broadband connection provided by BT, then the receiving mail server will be expecting the mail server to be one of BT's and not yours. If there is a mismatch, then your e-mail wil score highly for spam. And if the mail server detects a lot of incoming mail, it will refuse any more mail and possibly list the sending mail server as suspicious. The problem can then escalate as other mail servers read these global lists of suspicious mail servers and refuse to deal with you at all. And getting your name off such a black list of which you have never heard can be tricky!
The solutions is to talk to your e-mail provider. They will have a mail server on the Internet that is regarded as legitimate and so will be happy to pass on your mailings, provided you are following all the current legislation and are not spamming.
At Ambit New Media we run a server specially for mailings. We can host your database and names can be added directly to this database as people sign up to your news mailing from your web site. You can view your database online and choose to send out a mailing to all or to a filtered sub-list. Once the list of recipients is in place, you can then use your own e-mail software such as Outlook Express to send a single e-mail that will be distributed to this list, or you can fill in an online form with your message. What's more, your message can be text or a reference to a web page on your site. The web page will be turned into a correctly formatted e-mail, with all the images embedded so they are delivered correctly. Please contact Ambit New Media if you would like to know more.
