How do I make sure my emails don’t get blocked or marked as SPAM?

So you’ve just finished Day 7 in your Seven Days of Getting Started with SurveyGizmo tutorial, and you’re ready to send out your first email blast… but wait! You’ve sent yourself a test email and it went into your junk mail folder, or worse, your email was blocked! You know you’re not a spammer, and you know you’re not sending spam, so why did the message go into your Hotmail junk folder and get blocked by Yahoo? Lets take a look at some of the things that factor into SPAM scoring.

Email Content

Lets take a look at your email:

From: sales@sgizmo.com Subject: F R E E!!! GUARANTEED Amazon Gift card for taking our SURVEY!

  As time goes on, spam checkers are getting stronger and smarter. There’s a lot about this email that might increase its SPAM score. The subject line starts with the word “FREE” and it’s in ALL CAPS, both will increase the message’s SPAM score. You’ve also got the word “GUARANTEED” in ALL CAPS, and multiple exclamation marks (!!!), spam filters also don’t like the word “Survey” (I know, right?) which is in the subject line, in ALL CAPS. So what to do? Let’s change it up a little!

From: sales@sgizmo.com Subject: SurveyGizmo – What do you think about our product?

  Now the message looks more personal, and we can add in some information about the Amazon Gift card along with a survey link in the message body itself. Let’s still try to keep clear of ALL CAPITAL words, and spamming your messages with the words FREE and SURVEY. Add some real body to the message, “We’ve noticed you’ve been a customer of ours for quite some time…” (this will help with more than just email deliverability, but will also help your message seem more personal, showing that you realize your respondents are real people with real lives and not just some case study).

What is an SPF Record?

An SPF record stands for a Sender Policy Framework, which is an open standard created to stop forgery of FROM addresses. SPF helps mail servers distinguish forgeries from real mail by making it possible for a domain owner to say, “I only send mail from these machines.” That way, if any other machines try to spoof mail from that domain, the mail server knows that the FROM address is forged.

For example: Let’s say you send an email invite in SurveyGizmo from You@Yoursite.com to You@yahoo.com. Yahoo would get the message and say, “OK, this email says it’s from Yoursite.com… but wait, it actually came from SurveyGizmo!” Yahoo’s email server would then contact Yoursite.com and ask if SurveyGizmo has permission to send messages in their name.

For more detailed information about SPF records please refer to: http://spf.pobox.com

For SPF Record Testing Tools, please see: http://www.kitterman.com/spf/validate.html

When should I use one?

An SPF record is generally used when your company is trying to avoid people using your domain for SPAM. The thing you need to know when working with SurveyGizmo is making sure that if you do have an SPF record, that we are white-listed in it. White-listing us will allow you to use your domain as the “from” field when using the SurveyGizmo application to send out email campaigns, and send email actions.

What should I avoid?

If you don’t have an SPF record already set up, then we don’t recommend setting one up. Adding one will most likely not increase your deliverability in anyway.

If you already have an SPF record, or are setting one up for other purposes, you’ll want to make sure you don’t set it to only allow SurveyGizmo. If you do, then you won’t be able to send out emails from any other servers.

If I have an SPF record, and need to whitelist SurveyGizmo, what should I use?

If you already have an SPF record set up on the domain you want to send emails from, then we recommend adding the following IP addresses to your SPF.

ipv4:74.63.152.0/24

 This will include our servers in your preferred server list. You can also use “include:sgizmo.com”, however, the IP addresses above are more practical. If you were to use “include:sgizmo.com” it would include all of our SPF records, which is excessive as we have internal SurveyGizmo IP addresses that the application doesn’t use.

If I do need to set up an SPF record, how do I do so?

Here are is a great resource on setting up a valid SPF DNS record: http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/safety/content/technologies/senderid/wizard/

Finishing Up

SurveyGizmo also offers a spam score checker for all of our plans that offer the Email Campaign feature (Personal and above). When click on the [?] next to “Spam Score” in the “First Invite” of your Email Campaign it will give you more details on your Spam Score.

Good luck! If you have any questions or issues with this tutorial, please use our community forums!