Customer Support Emails Caught In Spam Trap

[limoshawn]

I am having a terrible time with customer support email getting intercepted as spam. Its a very helpless feeling when I get 3 and 4 emails from customers requesting help and i know they are not receiving my responses. I can only imagine how they are feeling (ripped off).
As a result I am going to implement a "help ticket" program on the site.
I was just wondering if anyone else has been having the same problem and what you did to solve it.

[8foldpath]

The help ticket sounds like a great way to communicate with customers. That email issue stinks. I know what you're talking about. Eventually you'll need it.. What if they forget their password? How will you notify them that you responded?

I don't often get email sent to their spam. Maybe it's your ISP? Maybe your IP is marked for spam?

[limoshawn]

8foldpath-
It doesn’t happen very often however when it does it seems to be from the same isp so you could be right about my ip being marked as spam..

[BananaFish]

Make sure that the network you're hosting on isn't black listed anywhere, and set up SPF records for your domain.

[DryFire]

We recently switched from shared hosting to a virtual private server primarily for this reason. It’s a real pain when other sites on your shared server decide to spam a ton of people and get the server black listed for everyone. Moving to our own server also allowed us to apply to white list programs (they don’t accept sites on shared servers) and SPF. Since making the switch we’ve had much better luck getting our emails through.

[grobe]

Send out your customer support emails from one of the big sites almost nobody blocks: gmail, yahoo, hotmail...

[budgie]

The help ticket sysem isn't that great as an alternative as half the time they don't ever look at the ticket again. We can see when and what time our customers have checked their tickets and probably 5% (mainly AOL and Hotmail users) never see our replies. We send emails and have an online ticket system so double our chances and still can't always get through. All you can do is ask for a phone number as well so you can call them if they don't get your emails/tickets.

[Rugles]

Let me guess ..... spamcop is causing you trouble.

What a surprise.

[Oliver Henniges]

I recall I had some trouble some time ago sending mails to aol customers. If I remember correctly, i found my mail account on a spam-lists. If you say three quarters of your mails don't get through, it is quite likely someone reported your mail-account as spam; maybe a competitor...

You might check this issue, but I don't have any urls at hand.

[limoshawn]

Thanks for the input. We have decided to put the helpdesk on hold for a bit and change our cart to be more real-time. Seems to be working well so far, conversions are down just a hair but support requests are almost non existent. I would rather lose a few customers beforehand instead of having an upset customer that thinks we are avoiding them.

[sabai]

Something worth doing is checking what score your email gets with spam-detection tools. Get spamassasin up and running and send yourself emails from your cart or whatever then check the spam score. For automated emails, you will be surpised how much improvement you can do.

Check out this list of tests performed by spamassasin - others have similar tests:

[spamassassin.apache.org...]