Tutorial: 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).

SPF Records

Due to the fact that a significant majority of SPAM comes from forged (spoofed) addresses, a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) standard is being implemented by a number of ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and mail hosts, including several major providers like Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, Comcast and Qwest. Those providers have begun to require SPF records to allow mail through their networks. Mail systems will need SPF records for their domains if they want their mail to be accepted by those providers.

SPF 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.

In a nutshell, 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

First, you need to design the appropriate SPF record for your domain. We recommend using the SPF Wizard at http://spf.pobox.com/wizard.html. You’ll need to enter your domain name into the ‘Let’s set up SPF records for’ field, then press ‘Begin’. Based on your answers, an appropriate SPF record will be displayed at the bottom of the page. If you want an explanation of the record at any time, you can press ‘Explain’.

Your SPF record will need to include: sgizmo.com

Once you’ve designed the SPF record, you’ll need to log into your server control panel and navigate to the SPF records section (this varies greatly by exactly which control panel software you’re using), paste the record you designed without the “quotes” into the space provided for the default TXT record, and save your changes.

If any of this seems confusing or you need additional help getting it set up, you can contact your DNS, email or web hosting administrator with the request to add an SPF record for your domain name(s) to avoid mail delivery problems.

Finishing Up

SurveyGizmo also offers a spam score checker for all of our plans that offer the Email Invite feature (Personal and above). Click the “Test” button to find out more!

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