Spam Validators - Extremely Urgent Suggestions Required

[chadhaajay]

Hello Friends,

We are experiencing a very strange problem from quite a few days now. The emails that we send to the customers or people who contact us via website are being considered as JUNK and they are being either being blocked by the SPAM filters & are returning back (bouncing back) with messages like "SPAM Confidence Level" OR they are automatically moved to the Junk mail folder of the mailbox.

Strange word I have used above because there is nothing that can be considered as SPAM/JUNK in our emails. All our emails are just to the point answers to customer questions. We don't know what is going wrong but may be the links to our website in the email is making them considered as SPAM or JUNK or may be the HTML format being used for emails. We have tried to remove both without any success so we are quite frustrated now as why our emails are being considered as SPAM or JUNK.

So, my question is related to knowing of any such software (online/offline) that can tell us what we have wrong in our emails and why they are being considered as SPAM or JUNK. So, some kind of tool that validates the content, subject or emails and tells us what is wrong and how it can be corrected so that we can be sure that our emails will safely reach the inbox of customers.

Thanks in advance...!

Sincerely,

Ajay Chadha (Director)
Chadha Software Technologies

[SeoSem]

http://spamcheck.sitesell.com/

[chadhaajay]

WOW! That was quick...!

I'll spend some time with this tool and you know if this helps or not.

Sincerely,

Ajay Chadha (Director)
Chadha Software Technologies

[SeoSem]

Well, you said Extremely Urgent and I didn't want to slow you down by writing some stuff :)

[nelsonez]

Hi chadhaajay,

What type of coding are you using for the sending of your webform-generated emails? I assume you may be using the sendmail process to send the email. If this is the case we have had extensive experience with tripping spam filters because of problems with the headers in the formatted email that is delivered by sendmail. Many times the FROM: field is the culprit. A simple fix is too make sure you have a name in "" quotes such as From: "Your company" <info@yourcompany.com>

Can you provide some more information? Maybe show us the header information for one of your emails that is sent from the web form.

Also it is very possible that your server has been flagged. Check your IP address against some common blacklist spam sites like spamhaus.org

Post us some more info and maybe we can help.

Eric

[Webnauts]

Thread moved here in the "Internet Security Discussions Forum", as it is not a "Search Engine Optimization" issue.

[arthurakay]

nelsonez may have hit the nail on the head with the IP address or message header.

Even if your IP addresses aren't flagged, corporate spam filters are notorious for being hard to get through.

Have you tested your messages to free accounts like Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail? These could be great indicators if the problem is in your message (content or header) or something else entirely.

[orangemike]

Originally Posted by chadhaajay

Strange word I have used above because there is nothing that can be considered as SPAM/JUNK in our emails. All our emails are just to the point answers to customer questions. We don't know what is going wrong but may be the links to our website in the email is making them considered as SPAM or JUNK or may be the HTML format being used for emails. We have tried to remove both without any success so we are quite frustrated now as why our emails are being considered as SPAM or JUNK.

Lots of folks I know have their filters set to reject any so-called "e-mail" that uses HTML as by definition being spam/junk, since that's where the viruses and worms hide.

[rogerbeta]

Originally Posted by chadhaajay

Hello Friends,

We are experiencing a very strange problem from quite a few days now. The emails that we send to the customers or people who contact us via website are being considered as JUNK and they are being either being blocked by the SPAM filters & are returning back (bouncing back) with messages like "SPAM Confidence Level" OR they are automatically moved to the Junk mail folder of the mailbox.

Strange word I have used above because there is nothing that can be considered as SPAM/JUNK in our emails. All our emails are just to the point answers to customer questions. We don't know what is going wrong but may be the links to our website in the email is making them considered as SPAM or JUNK or may be the HTML format being used for emails. We have tried to remove both without any success so we are quite frustrated now as why our emails are being considered as SPAM or JUNK.

So, my question is related to knowing of any such software (online/offline) that can tell us what we have wrong in our emails and why they are being considered as SPAM or JUNK. So, some kind of tool that validates the content, subject or emails and tells us what is wrong and how it can be corrected so that we can be sure that our emails will safely reach the inbox of customers.

Thanks in advance...!

Sincerely,

Ajay Chadha (Director)
Chadha Software Technologies

Send me an email that has a problem , maybe we can help.

[chadhaajay]

To arthurakay, We have tested the emails with varous email service providers like hotmail, yahoo & gmail. The email successfully passes through the junk filters of Hotmail & Yahoo but GMail puts it in the SPAM folder.

To orangemike, I cannot understand why people are so crazy to consider HTML content as SPAM because most of the emails like WPW daily newsletter is passing the SPAM filters successfully and it is purely HTML content email.

To rogerbeta, Please PM with your email addreess so that we can send the emails to you as you seems to be quite confident about email dignostics

Sincerely,

Ajay Chadha (Director)
Chadha Software Technologies

[arthurakay]

In my experience, gMail has pretty strict content filters. I would suggest testing your message in the following way:

1. Send a blank email - if gMail puts it in the SPAM folder, you know it's something to do with your header, subject line, or "from name".

2. If the blank message passes, you know it has something to do with your message content.

HTML messages are usually not blocked entirely - the images are more likely to be blocked automatically (in Outlook, Hotmail, and gMail).

More importantly - focus on the ISPs that are most important to your business. Corporate SPAM filters will be the hardest to crack, but if your business is mostly coming from Hotmail or Yahoo, you're already doing pretty well.

Also - are you Sender ID compliant? That could have a lot to do with your issues...

[wige]

If the e-mail is being sent through a web interface that you have installed on your server, that software may add a <spam> tag into the header. I have had this happen on a Linux server I was using a few years ago. I found out one of the default settings was to label every sent e-mail as spam.

[chadhaajay]

To arthurakay,

I'll try to send blank email to test headers and if it passes throguh GMail then I'll see what could be wrong with content. By the way, there are no images in the email content at all. The email is being created from scratch in Outlook 2003 and we have prepared a fixed format of the emails. So, the email is not being sent by any mail functions like sendmail or automatic mails.

Sincerely,

Ajay Chadha (Director)
Chadha Software Technologies

[chadhaajay]

Hello Everyone,

I think we have found the solution to our problem. It was the nasty MS Office tags being inserted in the email when we created the email using Outlook 2003 where MS Word is used as the default editor. We just acted upon the advise of some of you and created the email content in plain HTML with CSS. We used that HTML file as template for the email and sent it to GMail for testing and VOILA :)

It was present in the Inbox of GMail :)

Thanks a lot to all of you who spent their precious time with our problem.

Sincerely,

Ajay Chadha (Director)
Chadha Software Technologies

[arthurakay]

Microsoft if the root of just about every problem... here is yet another example.

Had I realized you were using Word (the text editor for Outlook) to create your emails, I could have solved this problem immediately. I'm glad you figured it out though.

I've posted this before in other forums, but I'll say it again - never, ever use Word to write your HTML code.

[chadhaajay]

Thanks for the information. By the way, is there any option to not use MS Word as the default Email editor in Outlook 2003?

I mean is someone has just outllok 2003 and not word then what does outlook use as editor?

[arthurakay]

I'm not 100% sure, but I think Word is bundled in with Outlook. I don't even know if you can only get Outlook (or Word, or Excel, etc) without the rest of the Microsoft Office package...

[chadhaajay]

Yes, all these products are available from Microsoft as a single package as well if you do not want to purchase the complete Office package.

[chadhaajay]

Yes, all these products are available from Microsoft as a single package as well if you do not want to purchase the complete Office package.