HELP! How can I prevent my mail from ending up in Client's SPAM Folder???

[VideoNewbie]

i sent a very important email to a client and when i called them to follow up today they told me that for some reason my email ended up in the spam folder which is why they had not seen it.

How can i prevent my email from ending up in someone's spam folder?
What things do mailing services look for to categorize someone's mail as "spam" ?

 

[miles01110]

Ask them to mark you as "Not Spam" ?

 

[Gelfin]

The easiest thing is to have your client whitelist you, which if you're on good enough terms with the client to call him, should be doable. If your message was junked by, say, MS Outlook, adding you to his Contacts list should do the trick.

The arms race between spammers and spamfighters being what it is, it's almost impossible to give you a list of things spam engines might look for. If such a list were possible, any spammer would immediately start sending out messages that violate none of those rules.

If convenient, you might try having your client examine the MIME headers of the message. Some spam engines will actually put their scoring for a message into a header, which could give you an idea why the message was considered spam.

 

[VideoNewbie]

The easiest thing is to have your client whitelist you, which if you're on good enough terms with the client to call him, should be doable. If your message was junked by, say, MS Outlook, adding you to his Contacts list should do the trick.

The arms race between spammers and spamfighters being what it is, it's almost impossible to give you a list of things spam engines might look for. If such a list were possible, any spammer would immediately start sending out messages that violate none of those rules.

If convenient, you might try having your client examine the MIME headers of the message. Some spam engines will actually put their scoring for a message into a header, which could give you an idea why the message was considered spam.

having my client whitelist me would solve that problem with him but
im thinking about the countless other emails ive sent out which ive sent out that might not have gotten replies because it ended up in their spam folder...

surely there must be an effective way to get around this.

seems kind of a primitive system if good mail is getting sent into spam?

is there any way i can examine my own "mime headers" in my own spam folder? how would i do such a thing?

 

[Ttownbeast]

By talking to your client directly using a personal e-mail addy, keeping your client off of automated mailing lists, the reason your client has your email routed to the spam folder is because your client has the suffix ...@whatever.com set to send it there by choice, because the client feels the interaction has become too impersonal and has chosen to block you.

 

[Gelfin]

seems kind of a primitive system if good mail is getting sent into spam?

What you're seeing is called a "false positive," and it happens in every spam control system. In the truly simplistic case, imagine a spam filter that looks for particular words common to spam, say, "mortgage." The problem is that sometimes you actually do want to have a legitimate conversation with somebody about a mortgage. So you need a more complex system that looks at many different facets of the message and tries to guess. A message containing simply the word "mortgage" won't trip the filter, but a message with a subject line containing the words "lower" and "mortgage" with a forged sender address and coming from an internet site in Russia would.

Every time spam filters get more complicated, spammers get more creative in figuring out the rules and crafting messages that get around them, then the spam filters have to become more sophisticated again. A lot of antispam products use some form of machine learning, which complicates the rules beyond the ability to describe them explicitly, but still mistakes are inevitable.

There are even gray area messages where a human being cannot universally declare that a particular message is spam. There are a few advertisements I want that, to another person, would be spam. Finding a perfect balance between good messages getting filtered and bad messages getting through is all but impossible.

Whitelisting a recipient is the only universally reliable way of avoiding this. A lot of companies advise people to add a particular address to their contacts so that commercial correspondence will make it through the spam filter.

is there any way i can examine my own "mime headers" in my own spam folder? how would i do such a thing?

It is somewhat unlikely that you and your client have the same spam filter, and how you get to the headers varies by email application. Anything you could find from your own end would likely tell you little about what happened at his.

 

[MikhailT]

having my client whitelist me would solve that problem with him but
im thinking about the countless other emails ive sent out which ive sent out that might not have gotten replies because it ended up in their spam folder...

surely there must be an effective way to get around this.

seems kind of a primitive system if good mail is getting sent into spam?

is there any way i can examine my own "mime headers" in my own spam folder? how would i do such a thing?

There's no effective method at all, period. If there was, every spammers would've figure it out by now and we'll be spammed to death.

You can ask the client to forward you the email as attachment so that you can see its full headers.

One of the things you have to consider is your own email settings. From what email address are you sending from? Is the DNS server configured correctly for the SPF/DKIM? Yahoo, MSN type of email addresses are more likely to be flagged false positive than professional self-hosted email addresses.

 

[VideoNewbie]

There's no effective method at all, period. If there was, every spammers would've figure it out by now and we'll be spammed to death.

You can ask the client to forward you the email as attachment so that you can see its full headers.

One of the things you have to consider is your own email settings. From what email address are you sending from? Is the DNS server configured correctly for the SPF/DKIM? Yahoo, MSN type of email addresses are more likely to be flagged false positive than professional self-hosted email addresses.

im sending from an @gmail.com address.

so are you saying an @personalwebsitename.com address would less likely end up in spam?

 

[MikhailT]

im sending from an @gmail.com address.

so are you saying an @personalwebsitename.com address would less likely end up in spam?

Depends on how it set up.