How to avoid being marked as spam

Swift Digital takes spam ratings seriously. They could affect our high deliverability rates and good reputation as an email service provider. We regularly check blacklists to make sure that we remain non-blacklisted and are universally recognised as a safe sender. We're notified of any spam reports and may suspend an account if we receive too many from the one sender. This being said, we very rarely get spam complaints and are usually able to resolve them completely.

Spam ratings can occur when your recipients’ servers or email clients filter and pick up your emails as spam, or if a recipient reading your email personally chooses to mark it as spam.

There are a number of ways to try to prevent people from doing this.

What you can do:

1. Make sure that the Unsubscribe link in your template is easily accessible for recipients to use. This means that if your recipients no longer want to receive your email communication, they can click this link and will receive an Unsubscribe Stamp associated with their email address in the Mail House. 
   
   
2. Set up a Custom Return-Path for your account, so that the return path matches the Sending Domain or 'Sender address' of your emails.
   
   
3. Ensure you have DKIM set up for your Sending Domains. We can also set up a digital encryption for your account called DomainKeys Identified Mail. This is a way for you to digitally sign the emails; like giving approval for us to send the emails on your behalf.
   
   
4. Never use purchased lists – you absolutely need permission to send email campaigns to people.
5. Finally, avoid 'spammy' content. Phrases like "Buy Now!!!!", or subject lines in ALL CAPITALS, or a high ratio of images to text content are some obvious ways to alert spam filters to your email, even though it may be legitimate.

An important aspect to avoid being reported as spam is to make sure that you are only emailing people who have opted in to receiving your email communication. You may want to include a note on your emails to remind people how they reached your mailing list.

You can find a full list of phrases and words that weigh into the spam score via this link. When publishing your document, you will see an approximate score according to Outlook's spam/junk filter rules as a guide line.

What we do:

When establishing a Sending Domain for your account, our team will assist with setting up the Deliverability requirements and authentication, in conjunction with your IT Team. Please note that over time maintenance is often required by your internal team, to monitor changes and keep up to date with current domain requirements. 

We have also put strategies in place that help emails to be not marked as spam when going through Microsoft exchange (a program commonly used for anti-spam and anti-virus protection).

Sometimes emails may be picked up by spam filters because the return-path of the emails are not the same as the 'from address' of the emails. We do contain information in all of our mail headers to indicate that we are a bulk email sending company which helps to avoid this.