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How to I disable spam for my emails?

My emails are being flagged as spam

  • Emails I send are being flagged as spam. Over the last 5 years or so I've run multiple opt-in mailing lists for my own site and the sites of others. In the past 6 months or so I've noticed a huge drop in the number of replies I get. Today, I test-sent some letters from each of my domains to my own Hotmail account. When I went and checked, all had been flagged as spam. As I say, my mailing lists are all true opt-in lists. However, one of the lists only sends a couple emails a year (for the past 2 years). I'm assuming that some of the subscribers didn't realize what they were and flagged them as spam and this "spam data" has propagated to various email-hosting places. However, I also sent some test-emails today from addresses that *are not* used for mailing lists and those also were sent to spam so I'm assuming these filters are working off my IP or something like that. My questions are: 1. In general, what can I do about this? 2. I am in the process of starting a new project that has a fresh domain and has never sent an email. I was going to test it by sending to my hotmail account and seeing what happens. However, if I do this, will hotmail flag the new domain as a spammer since it's coming from the same IP? 3. Should I call my ISP (Rogers High Speed Cable) and request a new IP? How can I do this without getting their hackles up and thinking I'm a spammer? 4. What about non-hotmail services? Are these companies all getting their "spammer IDs" from the same pool? Is there some service that can be used to send a test message to to see if it's being flagged as spam? Are there Mefi members who use third-party spam-filtering services that would allow me to send them a test-message to see if it's coming through? Sorry for the lengthy post but the majority of my online projects have been email-based and this is obviously quite distressing. Thanks!

  • Answer:

    If you're running your own mail server (or using mail-sending software that delivers directly to the destination mail server) on a basic cable modem connection, then your mail is quite likely to be viewed as spammy by a lot of systems. Changing to sending out mail through your ISP's SMTP server may help (of course, your ISP's server may not be competently run). Also, if you are sending directly from your own machine, then you need to have a nongeneric reverse lookup (PTR record) for the IP address, not some long combination of IP-address-derived numbers and geographic abbreviations that looks like you're someone's home computer. Getting mail to people on big ISPs (or even small ISPs) is a challenge nowadays. Spam is pretty much killing e-mail marketing. AOL provides some useful information at http://postmaster.info.aol.com. I haven't really seen anything similar for other ISPs.

dobbs at Ask.Metafilter.Com Visit the source

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Still going through most of the posts and checking stuff. zsazsa, I sent you an email from my regular account (I can't send thru the list without mailing everyone). Thanks!

dobbs

Bah. Thanks for all your help but I think my head is about to explode. This stuff's too complicated for me. It really angers me how Spammers fuck everything up for everyone--not to mention the morons who buy shit from them. Ugh. Though my new project was going to incorporate a new mailing list I think I'll just nix the plan and go RSS--not nearly as nice for the kind of shit I do but solves the problems pretty easily and forces me to learn a new tech thingy, which I suppose is good. One other thing, though: it's kinda fucked that hotmail is sending my regular, non-list emails to spam folders. If I send an email to a bunch of friends with hotmail accounts and get them to click "this is not spam" will that help the hotmail spam identifier globally or just for their own accounts? Thanks, all!

dobbs

These two content checkers won't help solve your current problem but may be useful going forward: http://www.lyris.com/contentchecker/ and http://spamcheck.sitesell.com/. Good luck, keep us posted.

madamjujujive

Mail servers usually don't check the first originating IP against the blacklists, ack. sorry i got that wrong. as zsazsa says, they check the last one. if you're running the smtp server yourself, that's you. otherwise it's your isp (unless there's multiple hops, but normally the check is at any gateway that precedes internal redirects).

andrew cooke

It could also be flagged as spam because the program which sends the emails out has a signifier which marks it as coming from a non mail-client source. I use a delphi DLL to send emails, and the line "X-Library: Indy 8.0.22" in the header isn't liked by spam filters.

seanyboy

1. In general, what can I do about this? Change your email name to something besides EnlargeYourPenis. :-)

curtm

Hmm. Okay. A few more stupid questions: I own multiple domains but they're all at Dreamhost and set up in the same way I emailed you. Do all these spam checker things just check numbers and whatnot or do they look at domains as well? One of my domains has the word shag in it and the other has the word trash in it. I always fear those are bad things. I'm suspicious because often I email people for the first time and I never hear back. This happens like... I dunno at least half the time and maybe 7 out of 10 times. I find that strange. (I mean, sure, maybe they don't like me or are just ignoring me but I like to think that's not the case.)

dobbs

Mail servers usually don't check the first originating IP against the blacklists, as they're usually on dialup, dsl, or cable. Any subsequent servers will be checked, especially the last hop before it reaches the recipient's mail server. There are dynamic/dialup blacklists that are supposed to prevent such people from sending mail directly, bypassing legitimate mail servers. Your IP is probably in those ranges, which really isn't a problem. You'll actually want to check the server that Dreamhost's Announce List email goes through.

zsazsa

zsazsa, thanks for that. The thing is that the emails I've sent to my own hotmail account are from the same account that the email I sent you is from--not from my lists. Weird. When I punch my IP into those checker sites I come up as being on 3 of the lists. I'm gonna try to get them to delist.

dobbs

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