How to Ensure your Emails are Received

Increasingly, filtering systems are trying to keep spam out of customers' inboxes. Unfortunately, the filters are often very coarse and sometimes they accidentally filter the email that your customers want to receive.

Never spam

The most important thing you can do to help yourself — and to help other people who want to run legitimte businesses on the Internet — is to conduct your own communications in an honourable and ethical manner:

• Never send emails to people who would not be happy to receive them.
• Never send emails that you would not be happy to receive yourself.
• Never send an e-zine or a newsletter without them being requested.
• Always provide an obvious and easy method for cancelling newsletters and e-zines.

Check the content

The next thing you can do is to reduce the chances of your emails being rejected by anti-spam software. Try to avoid:

• Swear words.
• References to the many articles that spam implores you to buy.
• JavaScript.
• Any other computer code other than HTML.
• Anything else that could be mistaken for computer code.

You can also get a free Spam Rating for your emails by going to mail tester.

Get Whitelisted

The best way of making sure that your emails get through to your customers is for them to add your domain (e.g. mwls.com) to your their 'whitelist'. You could send them a links to our article on How to Ensure You Receive Important Emails to help them do this.

Provide an alternative

If the above fails, either try asking your customers for an alternative, unfiltered email address or provide your customers with the facility for reading the message on the Internet. If you make the request by email, you will need to keep the email as short and simple as possible. The following is an example of this type of email:

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to deliver this month's newsletter to you — possibly because it was blocked by anti-spam software. To make sure you receive our newsletter, please consider adding mwls.com to your contact list, replying to this email or supplying an alternative email address. For more information on making sure you don't miss important emails, please have a look at:
How to Ensure You Receive Important Emails

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