Getting mailshots / new post notifications through Spam-alley

Dodge those filters? White those lists?

[Casethejoint]

I've had a problem with some rogue forum users in the past. Their activity meant that there was a massive outflow of email notifications to legit forum users, a load of bounces from the ISPs, and users reporting messages as spam. Bad karma all round, especially since we are a non-profit.

I think that this has affected the delivery rate from both our notifications and our newsletters. There's some discussion from last year elsewhere on these boards about ensuring that your outgoing content is customised, and buying into a "bonded email" scheme.

I'd appreciate your thoughts about the state of the art on:

designing text emails that are not "spam-a-likes"

getting white-listed

persuading users to use "unsubscribe", not "this is spam"

Anyhow, over to you...

[rogerd]

I'd try a few things. First, be sure that outgoing messages tell people how to stop them. People subscribe to email notification and then can't figure out how to turn it off, so they flag the messages as spam.

Second, identify large ISPs where you know you have a problem with blocked emails. Contact them (or read their site info) to find out what you can do to get unblocked.

Third, be sure you know what you are sending out. One popular forum package has the option to keep sending registration confirmation emails daily if the user doesn't confirm his address. Over time, this can build up in a huge amount of mail to dead addresses, not a good indicator of mail quality to ISPs.

Next...?

[Casethejoint]

I run most things through a well-trained spamassassin - with eerie precision, it tags newsletters and list-serv mails as spam. This is quite a shame. Do you know of a good resource that pools the whitelisting procedures for the major ISPs?