How to Avoid Spam Filters | Hacker News Reader

How to Avoid Spam Filters

mailchimp.com

39 pointskatiey27 comments

This is a cop-out article that MailChimp can direct its customers to when they ask "how to disable spam filters." I worked in support for another ESP, and customers would often have unreasonable expectations about email delivery rates. Enough industries are corrupted, that customers thought that with enough money, we could bypass spam filters, or ensure 100% deliverability (never mind that half their email addresses didn't exist). I even had someone ask how they could make sure that everyone would open and read their emails. Like we sold some sort of Orwellian device that would hold people's eyes open and indoctrinate them to buy a specific Insurance.

Wouldn you agree that those people need to be educated on how email deliverability works? Isn't this a good starting point?

Have ESP's recovered any ground or power?

A couple years ago, I looked at switching from an in-house email server to an ESP -- MailChimp being one. Right as I was performing the cost-benefit, two things happened:

  1. Gmail started re-hosting email images, nullifying passive email-open 
     detection features even if the user ALLOWED images.[1]
  2. MailChimps added language around distribution caps.

As a minor dealbreaker, ESP's force mandatory unsubscribe links for CAN-SPAM compliance, no matter how small/private your list becomes.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/gmail-...

Not all ESPs force unsubscribe links. We ultimately put liability on our customers for CAN-SPAM compliance. We had CAN-SPAM compliance checks on by default, but they could be disabled. As to your original question, no, ESPs have not gained much in the way of power. I might be in the minority in my industry, but I think this is good. All of the arguments against page-based ads can be used against email-based ads. But in this case, the users have won, and have full power over their inbox.

Unfortunately I can't find a source at the moment, but I do remember reading that in Facebook's early days they discovered their spammy "Invite Everyone In Your Contact List to Join" emails were getting withheld from the inbox by Hotmail. Facebook made a payment(s) to Hotmail in order to get themselves whitelisted, and this was attributed as a key to their continued growth.

The best answer, in my humble opinion, is "Don't send SPAM".

If you only send mail to people who have willingly opted in, not through trickery, pressure, inducement or some BS promotion, they'll actually want to read your mail and won't tolerate it being binned with the SPAM.

Unfortunately, a lot of business people don't get that.

Except this isn't nearly enough. Email is quickly becoming like the SEO industry. It's not just enough to "have great content" to ensure you're ranked highly.

You have to manipulate it at the whims of the search engine / email provider.

I'd also add - your unsubscribe link should work, and work immediately, with no extra effort. There's no reason why it should take 48 hours for the unsubscribe to actually go through, or why I need to jump through 20 hoops after clicking unsubscribe to actually do it, or especially for the unsubscribe to not work at all. If your unsubscribe link is at all tricky, then I'm hitting report spam. Because you are, in fact, spam.

Speaking of ranty complaints, why does the linked page auto-scroll to the top when you click on it? That's lame and annoying.

Honestly, people shouldn't click the unsubscribe links anyway. Spammers use that as a way to make sure people are actually reading their emails.

This is true for newsletters you never subscribed to in the first place. But unsubscribing from mailing lists you once subscribed to should be possible (and done) through the unsubscribe link. There are a lot of valid reasons (change of interest, frequency of mailings ...) and I agree with the parent that unsubscribe links should work immediately and not try to discourage you from unsubscribing.

Having worked both sides of this (for companies mentioned in the article, even) I would label this "How to Play nice in the Email Space." Techniques for avoiding spam filters are much more nefarious.

I agree, but I bet an article titled "How to Avoid Spam Filters" gets a massively larger number of hits from search results than one titled "How to Play Nice in the Email Space."

Instead of "educating" marketers, Mailchimp should instead enforce double opt-in.

I've marked ~80% of emails reaching my inbox from Mailchimp as spam because they were sent without my permission. Yet I haven't seen a double opt-in flow in forever and I doubt marketers are going to change their mind about it.

What would also work would be for Mailchimp to allow a __user__ to opt in to double consent. From then on, no Mailchimp customer can send emails to me unless I confirm their initial request.

> I've marked ~80% of emails reaching my inbox from Mailchimp as spam because they were sent without my permission.

I think the status quo has grown to tolerate unsolicited email and accept that their inbox isn't the same property as their physical mailbox.

edit: Oh! Much like your physical mailbox, unless you host your own email, your inbox isn't your property either ;-).

Double opt-in is great. I actually recently got a complaint email from a reader complaining about how difficult it was to subscribe to my newsletter which I found to be hilarious.

One of the reasons I use double opt-in is because it means that the subscribers have to really want to subscribe and not do it by mistake. That seems to help improve the open rate which can be used as a selling point against other newsletter in my field with a higher subscriber count, but low open rates.

Unfortunately most people who are looking for an article like this are looking for "How to send spam and avoid spam filters", not "How to respect the attention of my valuable customers in such a way as to not offend their spam filters."

Tons of legitimate emails are caught in spam filters. The filter rules are mysterious and secret, and differ between clients. Gmail now has a >20% false positive rate for Linus Torvalds: https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/DiG9qANf5PA

That was a bug that was fixed. I would say someone like Linus Torvalds has a very unusual pattern of mail, getting a huge volume of mail from a single source that happens to be a mailing list.

I wasn't aware of any bug. It's just that the spam filter is super hostile to emails from lesser known sources. This was posted just the other day: http://liminality.xyz/the-hostile-email-landscape/

It's about how it's basically impossible to set up your own mail server, because everyone assumes you are spam by default. They don't even give you a chance to prove otherwise.

Best way to avoid spam filters is to not send spam.

There is a surprising number of people who don't know how to unsubscribe. To them, the spam button is their first response.

I'm not sure it's the email recipient who are clueless here.

As far as I'm concerned, if a company or group is emailing me, and it's not related to a specific purchase I've made with them, then it's spam, and I mark it as such. I don't care if you tricked me into opting-in through some fine print somewhere or I missed the opt-out button on a form one time or that you don't think it's spam or whatever.

Unless I've very explicitly taken an action to get your email, OR it's a receipt, order information, etc. then it's spam.

If it's inconvenient for the person sending the email, good.

A reaction to all the poorly configured unsubscribe landing pages. I click unsubscribe, wait 15 seconds for a page to load offering me to "review my subscription settings" filled with 99 checkboxes I have to tick individually, followed by having to enter my email address again "to confirm", and then half the time getting a 500 error.

So I've been trained to just hit the spam button, it's a lot easier and simpler way to ensure I won't see that crap again.

Pretty understandable considering how many marketers and website developers don't know how to and/or don't care to make an unsubscribe button that works. Click a few dozen that make you type your email again (haven't they heard of tokens?), uncheck to unsubscribe from 20 different types of newsletter, find a bunch of email settings in your account settings, supposedly take 48 hours to take effect, have no effect at all, or the page doesn't even load, and you start to think it's easier to just hit "report spam" and move on with your day.

As I posted elsewhere on this thread, I'm inclined to think that if you don't have a clear unsubscribe button that works immediately with no extra effort, then you are spam.

Funny. Since I never subscribed, it is exactly the spam I want to report as spam.

I always hear people claim this, and yet I've never signed up to TechTargetWatch or whatever the hell these people call themselves.

And curiously, they're always emailing a spamtrap.

And as soon as I unsubscribe from TechTargetWatch, I start getting spam from WatchTechTargets, to whom I've also never subscribed, and who also deliver to the same spamtrap address.

But never mind that, I have a rather more paranoid perspective on not using the unsubscribe link. Clicking through to that unsubscribe page...

- indicates that the email address is valid

- indicates that the email address goes to a person

- affords the opportunity to set a tracking cookie or fingerprint the browser

- associates the tracking cookie/browser fingerprint with a person

No thanks.

Can you do one on how to avoid Spam too

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