Forum Moderators: buckworks
I have a form on my site where people can request information about my business. From the information they provide I send out a semi-form letter telling them about my business. For those that I did not hear from I would send a simple follow up "if you have any questions" type e-mail. (which always gets through)
Now the standard almost universal response is that they never received my original e-mail. And it isn't bounced back either, it just disappears. The problem seems to be with AOL, Hotmail and MSN specifically.
What bothers me is that I can send a simple one line e-mail but if I try to add any details at all it is killed and the person thinks I have no interest in their business. This is killing my bookings and it is starting to give me a sour reputation with potential clients.
Anyone have any suggestions on how to get past these filters?
How about this:
Your website says "if you are eligible, you can sign up. Take our eligibility test. Enter your email addy here and click..."
<send them an email... refresh the page>
"You should receive an email from us with instructions. If you didn't we're sorry, but you are not eligible for our program. Only people with quality email service are eligible to benefit from our program, and your service provider is operating an unreliable mail system. If you failed this test, you're probably also not recieving emails others have sent to you.
Have you ever noticed NOT getting emails supposedly sent to you before? It is probably a frequent problem you aren;t aware of.
Thanks for trying... would you like to try another email addresss?"
Then offer clicks to form letters they can use to notify their MSN or whomever that they are disapppointed in the mail service, etc., and additonal tests to get a graphic, or a joke, or whetever.
I always go by my "dad test". If my Dad would go for it, it will work. My Dad would go for this; he would write nasty letters to his email provider within minutes of such a denial of benefits :-)
I've had to modify my web-triggered mail scripts to specify a non default sender, and mail has started getting through again. Previously mail was going out with a Return-Path of 'apache@webhost', now I'm overriding it with 'bounces@mydomain'.
I also occasionaly manually send out bcc'd messsages to groups of customers, these are pretty much not delivered at all any more.
This is commonly caused by a variety of
"spoofing" e-mail mass mailing worms.
I think's it's funny that they don't think to open their e-mail to our addresses before they sign up. Because these sites don't generate revenue we just let them go.
Would it also be a legal concern for ISPs if they are interfering with legitimage business communications? I recently had a request for photos from a newspaper where the e-mail address for the reporter was AOL and he could receive every e-mail I sent as long as it did not contain an image. I still don't know for sure if he got the images, which for me is free advertising and you can immagine the value in that. (I know... consult an attorney... etc. this is very frustrating)
Ugh.. I'm listed in the MCI list. I wonder how many problems that is causing for me. :o(
Another possibility is that your main message contains too many "spam words" -- terms frequently found in spam which some filters use to trash messages. You must guess what the offending words might be, and you can't do much if they are essential to what you wish to communicate.
