
How to Avoid Spam Filters - katiey
http://mailchimp.com/resources/guides/how-to-avoid-spam-filters/html/
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dexiwz
This is a cop-out article that MailChimp can direct its customers to when they
ask "how to disable spam filters." I worked in support for another ESP, and
customers would often have unreasonable expectations about email delivery
rates. Enough industries are corrupted, that customers thought that with
enough money, we could bypass spam filters, or ensure 100% deliverability
(never mind that half their email addresses didn't exist). I even had someone
ask how they could make sure that everyone would open and read their emails.
Like we sold some sort of Orwellian device that would hold people's eyes open
and indoctrinate them to buy a specific Insurance.

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LordKano
The best answer, in my humble opinion, is "Don't send SPAM".

If you only send mail to people who have willingly opted in, not through
trickery, pressure, inducement or some BS promotion, they'll actually want to
read your mail and won't tolerate it being binned with the SPAM.

Unfortunately, a lot of business people don't get that.

~~~
xux
Except this isn't nearly enough. Email is quickly becoming like the SEO
industry. It's not just enough to "have great content" to ensure you're ranked
highly.

You have to manipulate it at the whims of the search engine / email provider.

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ufmace
I'd also add - your unsubscribe link should work, and work immediately, with
no extra effort. There's no reason why it should take 48 hours for the
unsubscribe to actually go through, or why I need to jump through 20 hoops
after clicking unsubscribe to actually do it, or especially for the
unsubscribe to not work at all. If your unsubscribe link is at all tricky,
then I'm hitting report spam. Because you are, in fact, spam.

Speaking of ranty complaints, why does the linked page auto-scroll to the top
when you click on it? That's lame and annoying.

~~~
CaptSpify
Honestly, people shouldn't click the unsubscribe links anyway. Spammers use
that as a way to make sure people are actually reading their emails.

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mstolpm
This is true for newsletters you never subscribed to in the first place. But
unsubscribing from mailing lists you once subscribed to should be possible
(and done) through the unsubscribe link. There are a lot of valid reasons
(change of interest, frequency of mailings ...) and I agree with the parent
that unsubscribe links should work immediately and not try to discourage you
from unsubscribing.

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themensch
Having worked both sides of this (for companies mentioned in the article,
even) I would label this "How to Play nice in the Email Space." Techniques for
avoiding spam filters are much more nefarious.

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irl_zebra
I agree, but I bet an article titled "How to Avoid Spam Filters" gets a
massively larger number of hits from search results than one titled "How to
Play Nice in the Email Space."

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Veratyr
Instead of "educating" marketers, Mailchimp should instead enforce double opt-
in.

I've marked ~80% of emails reaching my inbox from Mailchimp as spam because
they were sent without my permission. Yet I haven't seen a double opt-in flow
in forever and I doubt marketers are going to change their mind about it.

What would also work would be for Mailchimp to allow a __user__ to opt in to
double consent. From then on, no Mailchimp customer can send emails to me
unless I confirm their initial request.

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stevesearer
Double opt-in is great. I actually recently got a complaint email from a
reader complaining about how difficult it was to subscribe to my newsletter
which I found to be hilarious.

One of the reasons I use double opt-in is because it means that the
subscribers have to really want to subscribe and not do it by mistake. That
seems to help improve the open rate which can be used as a selling point
against other newsletter in my field with a higher subscriber count, but low
open rates.

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thrownaway2424
Unfortunately most people who are looking for an article like this are looking
for "How to send spam and avoid spam filters", not "How to respect the
attention of my valuable customers in such a way as to not offend their spam
filters."

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Houshalter
Tons of legitimate emails are caught in spam filters. The filter rules are
mysterious and secret, and differ between clients. Gmail now has a >20% false
positive rate for Linus Torvalds:
[https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/DiG9qANf5PA](https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/DiG9qANf5PA)

~~~
thrownaway2424
That was a bug that was fixed. I would say someone like Linus Torvalds has a
very unusual pattern of mail, getting a huge volume of mail from a single
source that happens to be a mailing list.

~~~
Houshalter
I wasn't aware of any bug. It's just that the spam filter is super hostile to
emails from lesser known sources. This was posted just the other day:
[http://liminality.xyz/the-hostile-email-
landscape/](http://liminality.xyz/the-hostile-email-landscape/)

It's about how it's basically impossible to set up your own mail server,
because everyone assumes you are spam by default. They don't even give you a
chance to prove otherwise.

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LeoNatan25
Best way to avoid spam filters is to not send spam.

~~~
timClicks
There is a surprising number of people who don't know how to unsubscribe. To
them, the spam button is their first response.

~~~
xenophonf
I always hear people claim this, and yet I've never signed up to
TechTargetWatch or whatever the hell these people call themselves.

And curiously, they're always emailing a spamtrap.

And as soon as I unsubscribe from TechTargetWatch, I start getting spam from
WatchTechTargets, to whom I've also never subscribed, and who also deliver to
the same spamtrap address.

But never mind that, I have a rather more paranoid perspective on not using
the unsubscribe link. Clicking through to that unsubscribe page...

\- indicates that the email address is valid

\- indicates that the email address goes to a person

\- affords the opportunity to set a tracking cookie or fingerprint the browser

\- associates the tracking cookie/browser fingerprint with a person

No thanks.

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ericsidelis
Can you do one on how to avoid Spam too

