How to Avoid Spam Filters Blog
Proper Email Delivery and a Good Email Reputation Mean Everything!

I was just in Gmail and went to click the delete button on one of my own emails that arrives there as a test.

Since the delete button is only a quarter inch from the spam button, I, in a hurry I clicked the wrong one. I had just marked my own message as spam.

I wonder how many times that happens by mistake to our emails. What do you think?

The court unanimously agreed with Jeremy Jaynes’ argument that the law violates free-speech and overturns spammer conviction, setting the stage for a Supreme Court spam laws showdown!

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — The Virginia Supreme Court declared the state’s anti-spam law unconstitutional Friday and reversed the conviction of a man once considered one of the world’s most prolific spammers.

The court unanimously agreed with Jeremy Jaynes’ argument that the law violates the free-speech protections of the First Amendment because it does not just restrict commercial e-mails — it restricts other unsolicited messages as well. Most other states also have anti-spam laws, and there is a federal CAN-SPAM Act as well, but those laws apply only to commercial e-mail pitches.

The Virginia law ”is unconstitutionally overbroad on its face because it prohibits the anonymous transmission of all unsolicited bulk e-mails, including those containing political, religious or other speech protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” Justice G. Steven Agee wrote.

Agee wrote that ”were the Federalist Papers just being published today via e-mail, that transmission by Publius would violate the statute.” Publius was the pseudonym used by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay in essays urging ratification of the Constitution.

”In my view, the case was never about Jeremy Jaynes — it was about the First Amendment,” said Jaynes’ attorney, Thomas M. Wolf. ”The argument was never that there’s a constitutional right to send commercial spam. It was that the government cannot criminalize the sending of noncommercial e-mail for political and religious purposes, and that is what this statute did.”

Lawyers for the state had argued that the First Amendment doesn’t apply because the Virginia law bars trespassing on privately owned e-mail servers through phony e-mail routing and transmission information. The court rejected that characterization of the law.

Attorney General Bob McDonnell said he was ”deeply disappointed” and vowed to take the issue to the U.S. Supreme Court.

”Jeremy Jaynes used the private property of Internet service providers to defraud individuals worldwide,” McDonnell said. ”This was not a matter of free speech, it was fraud. Virginia acted appropriately to use this new law to put an end to this criminal behavior.”

John Levine, a board member of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail and one of the state’s expert witnesses in the Jaynes case, said he too was disappointed, but added that the ruling won’t have broad repercussions because Virginia is the only state that prohibits noncommercial spam.

”I don’t see it as a fatal setback for anti-spam law,” Levine said.

In 2004, Jaynes became the first person in the country to be convicted of a felony for sending unsolicited bulk e-mail. Authorities claimed Jaynes sent up to 10 million e-mails a day from his home in Raleigh, N.C. He was sentenced to nine years but is currently serving time in federal prison for an unrelated securities fraud conviction unrelated to the Virginia case, Wolf said.

Jaynes was charged in the spam case in Virginia because the e-mails went through an AOL server there.

The Virginia Supreme Court last February affirmed Jaynes’ conviction on several grounds but later agreed, without explanation, to reconsider the First Amendment issue. Jaynes was allowed to argue that the law unconstitutionally infringed on political and religious speech even though all his spam was commercial.

Wolf said sending commercial spam is still illegal in Virginia under the federal CAN-SPAM Act. However, he said the federal law does not apply to Jaynes because it was adopted after he sent the e-mails that were the basis for the state charges.

Email Delivery: Should I Add My Autoresponder’s SPF Records to My Domain?

I recently ran across a post that claimed that by adding the SPF records of the writers autoresponder (in this case AWeber) that he expected to get past being blocked by a Canadian ISP. This is complete crap because any authentication technology associates the email in question with the sending domain and IP address not the email from address or the return email address.

I even contacted AWeber’s CEO Tom Kulzer with this scenario just to be absolutely sure and here is the email excerpt.

Chris Lang wrote:

Let’s say that an ISP receives my email from AWeber with my from address and reply address in the header. Do they look at my SPF record to see if I have a SPF DNS entry associated with your (my autoresponder) email servers?

Tom Kulzer said

They look at aweber.com SPF records.

Chris:

Also is all email sent from AWeber under the address keywebdata (at) aweber.com sent from the same IP address everytime?

Tom Kulzer:

It’s not sent from the same single IP, but load balanced across the same range of IP addresses. Those ranges can all be found in our SPF record directly or in our FAQ on the website.

Chris:

In other words does it matter if authentication records associate my domain and from address with yours?

Tom:

Does sending from the same single IP matter? No.

Does sending from the same group of IP’s matter that have an excellent reputation and reliable volume of mail built over a long period of time matter? Absolutely, yes.

Chris:

Also is there any data to support a higher delivery rate due to the use of SPF, Sender Id and DKIM?

Tom:

Not that I’ve seen which clearly shows this, but general industry knowledge of how various ISP’s build reputations
of senders and make delivery choices tells me it does help support higher delivery rates.

Chris:

Tom you have been a wealth of information on email delivery to us all many times, I just want to thank you again for taking time away from your business to set us straight.

New CAN SPAM provisions released, not anything ground breaking

• An email recipient cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than his or her email address and opt-out preferences, or take any steps other than sending a reply email message or visiting a single Web page to opt out of receiving future email from a sender.

• The definition of “sender” was modified to make it easier to determine which of multiple parties advertising in a single e-mail message is responsible for complying with the Act’s opt-out requirements.

• A “sender” of commercial e-mail can include an accurately-registered post office box or private mailbox established under U.S. Postal Service regulations to satisfy the Act’s requirement that a commercial e-mail display a “valid physical postal address.”

• A definition of the term “person” was added to clarify that CAN-SPAM’s obligations are not limited to natural persons.

You can read the full CAN SPAM FTC press release here.

Part of avoiding spam filters is using other forms of social media.

If you have ever wondered how blogs get those cool Technorati buttons on their site, here it is.

Create a log in, or log in to Technorati, then go thru the “claim blog” process. Once you are done it will provide you with the code to add the buttons to your site.

Hope this helps! = Chris Lang

Avoiding spam filters today is like building a house of cards, a few wrong moves can bring it all down.

Yeah, I hate to tell you but your email delivery is VERY fragile. There are quite a few things that can cause disaster in email delivery, losses in profits, subscribers and even your domain. Take a look at Lyris report finds your email getting junked. It is getting worse and not any better. Hotmail and Yahoo junked opted-in e-mails about 20% of the time.

Idiots who click the spam button

Most people on the Internet view “email marketers” as spammers. Just mention at a social gathering that you send any type of email and the first thing out so some dumbasses mouth will be “So you are a spammer….” or “So you send spam…”

Just look at what my friend on Digg just posted and read the comments, Optimize Email Delivery with Best Practice Strategies. That was me that said “RTFA first” and I had to hold back a bit. Flame somebody on Digg and they will go to your profile and bury all your articles, accuse you of spam and get your URL blocked.

This is the mind set of most people that read our emails. If you send email you must on some level be a spammer. This translates directly to clicking the spam button just because someone did not understand your email or they felt it crossed the line of information too being commercial.

Migrating to a new server

Moving to a new server with a new IP address can be a disaster. SpamCop (now used by Microsoft), Hotmail, Windows Live Mail and a number of others all sandbox your email for up to six months under a new email server IP address.

You cannot set up a new box and start sending to your recipients like you would form the location you newsletter was previously sent from.

Adding poorly configured MTA’s and bad Authentication

I cannot tell you how many times I have helped someone who is not getting much email delivered and it turns out that their DKIM or DomainKeys authentication is not working at the ISP in question.

They tell me “Oh yeah, we already set that up and it is working fine, it passed all the tests.”

Here is a little trick. Send an email from your MTA to a Yahoo address that you have access to. Now open the email and view the header. If it says “passed” under the DKIM or DK test, you are fine. However most times it is not passing Yahoo’s test even though it came back good in the online tests.

Contact you MTA provider and you may have to possibly update your DNS entry or your MTA’s milter.

ISPs suddenly start canning your email for no reason

So let’s say Yahoo starts holding your email in it’s queue for four hours for no reason. They have been doing that lately, allot.

You keep getting “not delivered” messages so you keep resending to Yahoo. And then you resend, AGAIN. You are only hurting your reputation when you try to resend to often. When you see odd things and weird 451 emails coming back from an ISP don’t keep resending out of frustration and possible profit loss.

Stop what you are doing and find out if the problem is on their end or yours. A simple Google search of the problem can usually tell you that others are having the same problem or not.

Not using double opt in for new subscribers

Double opt in prevents spam complaints. Spam complaints are the result of a recipient clicking the “this is spam button” and will get you blocked faster than anything else. A visitor cannot misspell their email address and send someone else your emails with double opt in.

Double opt in also saves your email reputation because you are not bouncing emails to bad addresses. Those same misspelled emails that get the spam button clicked can bounce when the recipient does not exist. ISPs keep track of bounced emails and the server it is sent from. The more bounces, the lower your email reputation score.

The very first time someone clicks the “this is spam” button on an email you sent without double opt in can get you banned by the receiving ISP. Your host may delete your domain and you are going to definitely get listed on RBLs (real time blacklists).

Sure you can triple your opt in rate by not using double opt in, but all it takes is a five or six spam complaints and you are history! NO site, NO domain, GONE. Forever.

The Bottom Line

If you do not make these simple mistakes you will go a long way in avoiding spam filters and deliver more email. At the same time you will not be destroying your email reputation that you have hopefully spent alot of time building.