Suzi said:
Hello
I regularly send out a compnay newsletter in html format. It is being
rejected as spam by some of our recipients. Is this because it has internet
page links? it also has graphics and colours. If it is sent as a rich text
format will it also be rejected beacuse of this?
Sorry if this is a silly question but I am trying to work out how to get
this across to people without it being rejected but still in a stylish format.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
many thanks
Suzi
Most likely several of your recipients are at the same domain. Their
anti-spam filter looks for similar content (not exact but similar
enough) in e-mails delivered to multiple recipients at their domain.
E-mails with highly similar content (and trying to append the
hash-breaking garbage paragraphs won't work) that target multiple
recipients at the same domain where that number exceeds some threshold
qualifies it as spam at that domain.
Some users also use anti-spam programs that incorporate DCC to detect
bulk mails; see
http://www.dcc-servers.net/dcc/. This fuzzy algorithm
takes a hash value of the e-mail and reports it to the DCC server. Then
a count of how many other DCC users that have received the same (very
similar) e-mail gets returned. If that count exceeds the threshold
configured in the anti-spam program, it gets flagged as bulk mail (which
often is classified as spam). What the anti-spam filter does with
tagged spam is up to how the user configured the anti-spam program or
how they defined rules to handle the spam messages (which often have
different tags to show how the spam was detected but most users are too
lazy to inspect the tags and use multiple rules to differently handle
the differently tagged spams). I have different rules to handle spam
tagged by SpamPal that are detected by DCC, Bayesian, DNSBLs, and HTML
traits. Most users probably just look for the global "**SPAM" tag in
the Subject or in a header and treat all spam the same (by deleting it).
Having more than some pre-configured number of links in an e-mail will
also trigger some anti-spam filters. That is an HTML trait that might
be configurable in the user's anti-spam filter, along with invisible
text (same fore- and background colors), web beacons (1x1 pixel images),
excessive overly large or overly small text, obfuscated URLs, excessive
HTML comment tags, a number of superfluous HTML tags that commit to
effect to rendering the HTML message (like inserting "Via<B></B>gra" to
slice up a string in an attempt to get around word filters), and other
HTML spam tricks.
E-mails should never be sent using Rich-Text Format (i.e., Microsoft's
TNEF encoding). Unless you have a highly closed community where you can
enforce them to use Outlook as their e-mail client, like inside a
company with their employees, it is very likely that a large number of
your recipients won't be able to read your e-mails. No e-mail client
other than Outlook can understand RTF (although I've heard that Eudora
might support it). Not even Outlook Express can understand RTF. You
only used RTF when you can guarantee both sender and recipient are using
Outlook and when both are within the same Exchange mail server
organization (to prevent corruption of RTF during transport). A
"company newsletter" does NOT state if you are sending this bulk mailing
to just other employees inside your company or you are sending out some
announcement as a bulk mailing to your customers or sales prospects
(which would've had to opt-in to your mailing for it not to be spam).
You could put your newsletter on a web site and simply send a plain-text
(non-HTML, non-RTF) e-mail to your "members" that a new update is
available for them to read.
